


running from the weather

by angularmomentum



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Always a girl, Casual misogyny, F/F, HAROLD THEY'RE LESBIANS, Humour, Rule 63, body image issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-15
Updated: 2017-06-18
Packaged: 2018-11-14 11:20:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 21,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11207025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angularmomentum/pseuds/angularmomentum
Summary: Alex starts playing for Dynamo at sixteen.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hello. Yes, I am very aware there are actual lesbian hockey players out there, and I have seen many of them on the tumblsite. HOWEVER since I personally feel better appropriating the vague imprints of dudes to do my fictional bidding, that is exactly what I have done. 
> 
> This takes place in an imaginary timeline where any of the events I've mentioned make sense in the course of a hockey season.
> 
> An endless debt of thanks is owed to @rave who gave me a ton of ideas and indulged me in this fictional enterprise even when I inundated her with it, and to the crew, who are enablers in the extreme. You know what you did. 
> 
> Content notes at the end!

The C cups are not quite the right size, but the D cups are too big. Alex holds them both, sliding the silk through her fingers, catching on the lace where her callouses aren’t quite as smooth as they could be.

In the end, she does what she always ends up doing: she makes an appointment to have herself measured and have them custom made.

It takes some wriggling to see herself from behind in the full-length mirror, but the matching panties look they were made exactly for her ass, so she decides to buy them in three colours. If anyone wants to take it up with her, she’ll be delighted to show them the relative merits of matching lingerie.

Maybe it’s also so Nicke can roll her eyes when she rips them off, but Alex reserves the right to claim it’s because it makes her feel like she’s got a good secret, and a life lived in the spotlight can be a little thin on those, even if so much of what she is gets elided by the camera’s eye.

-

“Again?” Nicke asks, spying the shopping bags.

“You love it.” Alex shakes her hips, a little shimmy she knows Nicke finds infuriating.

Nicke just sips her coffee, flicking through whatever new app has caught her attention on her phone. Knowing her, Alex thinks it’s either a comparison app for different kinds of screw-heads or a how-to index for elaborate sexual positions. It’s a toss-up, and there’s no way to tell what gets Nicke hot on a given day. The only constant is that it’s weird and sideways and so completely Nicke that every time she kisses her it feels like a victory.

Since Nicke moved in, Alex’s flat in Zamoskvarechye has sprouted shelving in a variety of whites and greys, and her closets have taken on a demilitarised zone of demarcation; grey and white and black and all shades of heather spill away in perfect lines from Nicke’s side, in contrast to Alex’s riot of colour and texture and shape. Alex lives in the kind of clutter that would drive a magpie to distraction and emerges daily feeling as though she’s armed to the teeth, silk against her skin only half a secret.

Alex has never met a lipstick she couldn’t smudge and Nicke has never met a bra she agreed with, except the kind she can take off in one flick of contemptuous fingers.

“Well, are you going to model them for me or not?” Nicke asks, glancing dismissively at Alex over the rim of her perfectly white mug. “I was going to go to the gym.”

Alex grins and strips, stepping out of her dress and leaving it on the floor.

Nicke stares at it, watching Alex step over it in her six-inch heels.

Alex watches her lips curl into a slow, deliberate little smirk. Alex has always been of the opinion that Nicke’s lips are made for it, the way Alex’s whole face is made for smiling. Nicke looks best when she’s got a grudge.

“Are you going to pick that up?” Nicke asks her, putting her phone facedown on the kitchen counter with a click of glass.

“No.”

“Yes you are,” Nicke says, looking her up and down.

Alex takes off her old underwear and puts on the new ones, a riotous shade of teal with purple lace.

Nicke’s smirk takes on a hard edge as she sets her mug down and unfolds herself from the stool she’s been perching on.

Alex towers over her, six centimetres of natural difference exacerbated by Alex’s shoes, but when Nicke crosses the distance between them she feels huge to Alex, delicate at the extremities and solidly, deceptively curved, blonde hair swept back into a messy fall; she’s pale and frosty and sharp, and when she hooks two fingers in the elastic of Alex’s new underwear and pronounces them completely hideous, knuckles pressing hard into Alex’s skin, Alex goes warm all over with anticipation.

Nicke’s fingers slip lower. Nicke stares up at Alex, moves closer, shirt bunching between her small breasts as she presses in, fingertips moving in perfect, infuriating circles, a cruel, casual tease that she keeps up until Alex is whining, rigid with the effort not to lean into her, feeling herself start to throb with it. She’s so easy for this, even if nothing about Nicke ever has been. Nicke bites her lip, little teeth white against pale pink, and eases Alex open, little strokes, too soft and too slow and utterly perfect.

Then Nicke steps back, smirk almost a smile, eyes bright and fingers wet. “Pick up your shit,” she says, reaching for her abandoned coffee. “Leave your shoes on.”

-

Alex starts playing for Dynamo at sixteen.

She’s not disguised as a boy. She doesn’t get special treatment. It makes a headline or three, or five, or seven. She doesn’t get more money, or a better deal. She gets slammed into the boards so hard she breaks her nose, and she comes out of practice bruised and resolute and smiling.

She gets nothing she hasn’t worked for, and nothing she hasn’t punched and kicked and bitten for. She gets nothing extra for being the first girl in the KHL besides the joy of hockey and a circus, and nothing about that is anything she doesn’t want. Let it be a circus, if it has to be. Let it be a show.

“How did you do it?” someone asks her, on camera, when she is seventeen and off her first season, crooked-faced red-lipped and sporting what she considers extremely fetching sparkly eyeshadow that she knows make her grey eyes look enormous and arresting, even around the huge shiner ringing the left one, purple settled dark in the hollow beneath her eyelid.

“I’m too good to ignore,” she says, smiling for the audience.

They laugh. She’s serious. More importantly, she’s right.

-

“I want to play in the NHL,” Nicke says, dragging her nails over Alex’s ass in just the right way, blunt and hard and designed to leave perfectly parallel lines. “I’ll kill Don Cherry if I have to.”

“They won’t let you into Canada if you do.” Alex braces herself up on her elbows, draped half over Nicke’s solid thighs, cripplingly aware that the only reason Nicke is letting her be on top is for some arcane bend in what is undoubtedly a carefully-tallied game that might — if Alex is very good and very lucky — last all night.

“I’ll save the murder for later, then.” Nicke cups the back of Alex’s neck, long fingers reaching around to rest, hot and thin-tipped, almost to the hinge of her jaw. “Bettman first, of course.”

Alex grins, solid against the pressure of Nicke pushing her down. “You know it gets me hot when you talk about old men in bed.”

Nicke stares at her, draped, dangerous and easy, over the mound of pillows crowded against the headboard. She presses harder. Alex resists, watching the muscle working in her chest, her shoulder, the side of her neck where Alex can barely keep from biting her.

“Alex,” Nicke says, accent hitting her consonants into the back of her teeth.

“Nicky.”

“I want to play in the NHL. I’m not kidding.”

Alex bows to the weight of her arm, pressing a kiss to the very edge of Nicke’s peaked pink nipple, feeling the hitch of her breath as an answering heat in Alex’s navel.

Nicke grabs her hair and pulls her back, makes eye contact like she wants to bore a hole in Alex’s skull until she listens. “Fuck Moscow,” she pronounces, a coin-hard gleam in her eyes. “Fuck second-best.”

“Moscow’s great,” Alex argues, but she knows she’ll agree. There’s no way she can’t, when Nicke’s just repeating the same thing Alex has been quietly telling herself for four years.

Nicke stares at her, shaking her back and forth, slow and proprietary, examining Alex’s face from her dictated angles. “It has its redeeming features,” Nicke allows, and Alex finally lets her push her face between Nicke’s legs.

-

Nicke arrives in Moscow the Autumn Alex turns twenty.

Alex is used to being the trick pony, the right-hander with a shot that’s too fast to block and a constant cloud of suspicion and surprise around her every time she scores, even years after going pro, and years of showing up in jerseys with RUSSIA splashed across the chest and taking home medals.

She’s not “the girl” anymore, though. Now she’s just Alex, darling of the national team, too big, too loud, too colourful to have a single secret. Cameras have followed her for years, sniffing for stories she’s inevitably given them.

Lara Nikola Backstrom arrives in Moscow on an entry level contract at eighteen, a double-blind for an ongoing experiment. She’s big, round-cheeked and determined in a quiet, Swedish sort of way, and the first time she shoves Alex bodily into a wall in the hallway outside the locker room, Alex falls like a stone dropped into a still pond.

Her Russian is bad, but her hockey is—

Well, to put it bluntly, the first time Alex watches her make every defenseman on the blue line look incompetent, Alex thinks she might be thrilled, but it’s not until Nicke passes her the most ridiculous shots in perfect time, with perfect snaps of the wrists and a perfectly sour look of intense concentration on her elfin face that Alex thinks it might be more than something doomed to fail under the weight of scrutiny.

Russian, she can learn. There’s no teaching those hands. Nicke is filled to the brim with talent that can only be god-given, or would seem that way if Alex gave a half-chewed shit about god.

The only problem is that Nicke might hate her, but that, Alex can work on.

As much faith as Alex has in her own skill and her own talent, Alex might have also taken to heart the awful adage that girls who aren’t pretty should at least be charming.

-

Alex stays after practice to fix her face, spreading highlight over the broad sweep of her high cheekbones and carefully reapplying her eyeliner when she catches a glimpse of Nicke watching, hands buried in a cavernous sweatshirt, leggings sticking out the bottom doing nothing to disguise the long curves of her rounded thighs.

Alex wants to shake out the sweaty ponytail sticking out the back of Nicke’s hat with approximately the same fervour with which she craves a bloody steak after a long bag skate.

She holds up the stick of eyeliner, dragging her hair over one shoulder, catching Nicke’s eyes in the mirror. “Want some?”

“The day you put that shit on my face is the day I slash you between the legs,” Nicke says, in the same tone Alex imagines she might use to decline a second helping of mashed potatoes. Her Russian is getting better, which just serves to increase her vocabulary of impressively deadpan insults. The guys have started calling her “neiskrenniy,” an excruciatingly bad play on her name as well as an incorrect one; Alex thinks Nicke is utterly sincere in her carefully worded threats.

“Could have just said no.” Alex tosses it back into her nearly overflowing makeup bag, twisting her hair into a loose plait so it will dry in big, loose waves. “How’s Kashkin’s place?”

“He has six children.” Nicke arranges herself against the wall behind Alex, watching her in the mirror. “They get up at five.”

“Has he asked you to babysit yet?”

Nicke snorts. Alex expects her to turn around and leave any second, but instead she stays, watching Alex play around. It makes her want to put on a show, exaggerate the red of her mouth and the great black smoke-clouds she’s painting around her eyes. Alex paints herself with abandon, because Nicke is watching.

“Why do you bother?” Nicke asks, taking a step closer, her bag forgotten on the damp, tiled floor. There’s no ladies room, just Alex staying late to use the mirror, after the guys have gone. Just Alex, and just Nicke. “Who’s going to see?”

“Me,” Alex tells her. “I like it.”

Nicke comes closer, stepping in until she’s next to Alex, hips pressing into the bank of sinks, shoulder brushing Alex’s as she reaches out, traces the shape of Alex’s mouth in the mirror. “It makes you look—” she hesitates, catching Alex’s eyes and holding them, green of her irises washed-out in the terrible fluorescent overheads like old dollars. “You look expensive.”

“How expensive? Million-dollar contract expensive?”

“Endorsement deal expensive,” Nicke says, her small, pale mouth pulling sideways until suddenly a smile crests over her teeth, just a little mean and just a little sharp, like her small, pointed canines.

“They’d airbrush me.” Alex pushes the lipstick up again, aims it at where Nicke’s mouth is in the mirror and paints that too, tracing the careful bow of her upper lip and the fine sweep of the lower one. “Smile.”

Nicke bares all her teeth in a hideous approximation of a grin, eyes dead in her face. The lipstick on the mirror paints her teeth red.

“Perfect,” Alex says, meaning it.

“Drive me home,” Nicke orders, after a second. “I missed my ride.”

“Let me take you to dinner,” Alex blurts, throwing everything as much back into the little, foundation-stained bag as it will go. “Show you a better side of Moscow.”

So far, all Nicke has given her is frictionless hockey, the kind of poised, perceptive play Alex is desperate for, and steady, wordless eye contact across the locker room. Even if they are never friends, even if the closest Alex gets is hooking her arm around Nicke when she scores, Alex misses women. She misses the understanding she thinks they might be able to have, if it’s possible to miss something that hasn’t happened and might not ever happen.

“Okay,” Nicke says, after a beat. Then: “clean that up.”

Alex is shocked at the thrum the casual order sends through her, a plucked string in the back of her mind resonating with the light brush of Nicke’s voice.

Nicke watches her swipe it off the glass with the bottom of her practice shirt without a word, but she’s almost smiling when Alex throws her bag over her elbow and grabs Nicke’s too, offering it to her without a word.

She takes it, fingers brushing Alex’s knuckles.

In the hall, Nicke turns so fast Alex almost reacts badly, but Nicke has her by the shoulders and is pushing her into the breezeblocks, holding her up against the wall with her shoulderblades pinned back.

“You slouch,” Nicke says, looking up at her. “You shouldn’t.”

The edge to her voice is playful, but her hands are tight over Alex’s shoulders, warm even through her coat.

Alex feels like a tuning fork, like her teeth are conducting electricity, like she’s ready to peel Nicke out of her sweatshirt right there and cup the soft swell of her waist and pull her closer.

“I know a great place,” Alex says, wrapping a hand around Nicke’s priceless wrist and drawing her down the hall towards the fresh night air.

-

To say that Alex likes hockey would be somewhat burying the lede on a lifelong and all-consuming passion.

Alex at sixteen is already at her full and considerable adult height, and has already learned that rising above is not a one-time thing, not a single decision to shrug off “but when are you going to quit and do something you’ll actually have a career in?” or “do you really think you should be wearing that?” or the more insidious whisper of fear that seems to follow her, that people seem to demand from her: “Aren’t you afraid you’ll pour all this out of yourself and in the end it’ll be for nothing?”

Her mother stands right behind her. Her brother doesn’t. Her father doesn’t weigh in, because by the time Alex is old enough to drive, she’s already pushed hard enough to be invited for world juniors, and has already found an agent savvy enough to realise what a golden goose he’s sitting on, even if she’s 1.9 metres tall and doesn’t give a shit that the red of her lipstick only makes her striking.

Alex, at twenty, isn’t the highest paid member of Dynamo, but she’s the one the cameras follow, and the one who grins wide with her crooked jaw and enjoys the questions that volley at her over the microphones.

Yes, she does think it’s ridiculous the NHL doesn’t have any female players. After all, if they weren’t so backward, they’d recognise the talent they’re missing out on.

Yes, she’d consider it if they opened the draft, but Russia is the best country in the world for hockey.

The last one is a lie, as so many other things she says inevitably are. By the time she’s sixteen she’s already realised that just smiling through questions about marriage and family isn’t enough, and has already perjured herself in spirit, even if television isn’t a court of law. She’s not naive enough to think that in Russia it makes a world of difference.

Nobody ever asks her if it’s worth it, until Nicke shows up.

-

People think Moscow is grey, but Alex disagrees. There’s a particular colour to the air in winter that is an indescribable shade of blue, the kind that throws all the lights on all the buildings together, that blends tone and depth until everything has a smudged, dreamlike quality. The oldest buildings along the river are outlined in gold, reflecting on the water and in the heavy, cold air.

Nicke’s hair turns satin-red, coin-gold, water-blue in the lights as they walk along the banks back to Alex’s neighbourhood. It’s not quite cold enough to be uncomfortable, but it’s close, the damp heaviness of incipient snow seeking out gaps in their clothes to press against their skin.

Alex wants to run her fingers through the curls gathering at the ends of Nicke’s ponytail. She wants to pull her hands out of her pockets and hold them. She wants to take her to bed. She wants to take her out, hockey bags slung over their shoulders and callouses on their fingers.

“This way,” Alex says, cutting across the street on a whim. There’s a Swedish restaurant two streets over that she has been fully intending to take Nicke to, but somehow the look of her in the light is too much for Alex to resist.

Nicke looks up at the glass and steel tower Alex leads them to, and raises both eyebrows. “Is this because I said you looked expensive?”

Alex, wrapped in a coat over a shirt and skirt she knows clings in all the right ways, feels huge and gawky next to Nicke in her formless parka with its cavernous pockets and her snow boots with frayed laces. She wants to see her out of her carapace of goose down and thick cotton. She wants to feed her overpriced bruschetta and buy her the best vodka and watch her wrinkle her nose at caviar. She wants to take her up to the top floor and set her against the panoramic windows, with Moscow backlighting her. “We can afford it,” Alex says, shouldering open the door.

Five minutes later, Alex has talked them into a booth in the middle of the window facing the river. Nicke unzips her coat and strips off her gloves, tucks one impossibly long leg under herself on the plush grey couch, and only then seems to notice that Alex is staring.

Alex can’t even explain it; Nicke sits the same way here, where the cheapest entree is eye-watering and where people are already pointedly pretending they’re not staring at Alex, who would usually preen for it, throw an arm over the back of the couch and a pout over her shoulder and a smile for good measure. She sits like they’re in the tape room watching endless replays of Chelyabinsk’s second line, or of their own practices.

There’s something breathtaking about it, the way Nicke takes off her hat and does nothing to her hair, the way she hooks a thumb absently in the hole that’s developing along the hem of her sweatshirt, the way she’s pink from the cold and shiny with the glow of a late skate as though she’s sitting at home, and not backlit by the best view in Moscow.

“What?” Nicke asks, narrowing her eyes at Alex.

“Vodka,” Alex blurts. “To celebrate.”

“Celebrate?” Nicke raises both pale, pale eyebrows.

“Why not? You’re here. I’m not the only one anymore.” It comes out with considerably less bravado than Alex was intending, but every inch of her is making a solid bid for sensory supremacy; even her teeth clicking against each other seem loud. “Maybe I’m the one celebrating. You finally spoke to me, so I think that means I win, no?”

Nicke turns and flags down a waiter. “Order for us,” she says.

She might be laughing. Alex can’t tell, but she hopes she is, that the expression opaque in her eyes is amusement. She wants to make her laugh. She wants to sit next to her on the bench and lean in and knock their helmets together and hear Nicke’s deadpan evisceration of the opposition. She wants to lift her off her skates and spin her around when she scores. She wants to slip her hands up beneath the ancient, worn-soft fabric she’s always swathed in and brush her thumbs over the barrel-strut rise of her ribs.

Alex orders for them.

Nicke is an extraordinarily indelicate eater. Alex watches, transfixed, as she shoves half a bruschetta into her small mouth with her fingers, and her only thought is that she wishes she could see her like this all the time.

“Come home with me?” Alex asks, when she’s cleared the cheque without looking at it, and Nicke has come back from the bathroom with damp patches on her flanks where she’s dried her hands on her leggings.

Nicke raises her chin, looking down her impossibly straight nose. “Okay,” she says, voice a hoarse whisper. “Okay.”

The walk back to her apartment might as well not be happening for all Alex is aware of it.

All that matters is the way Nicke looks around the living room at its piles of clothes and books and discarded shoes and its riot of scarves colonising half the sofa. “You live like this?” Nicke asks, picking up a shoe with two fingers hooked under the thinnest diamante strap and holding it at Alex’s eye level.

Alex takes it from her. She can feel Nicke’s eyes on her as she hunts for its twin, finding it under the coffee table. She sets them together on top of it. Nicke’s entire face twitches as Alex takes off her boots and puts them on.

“Fuck,” Nicke whispers.

“I hope so,” Alex answers.

“Shut up,” Nicke says. “You’re ruining it.” She grabs Alex by the hair, hand slipping up under the braid that’s more flyaways than anything else by now.

Her lips are chapped from the cold, and she tastes like vodka and after-dinner mints. Alex doesn’t know what to do with her hands, heat rising in her bleeding out through her skin.

Later, there will be time for why. Maybe it’s a little bit of a lot of things; maybe it’s a little bit lonely where they are. Maybe it was meant to be a one-time thing, a rocket to the moon just to say they’d been there. It doesn’t matter, because now, Alex is twenty and has more money than she needs but not as much as she wants. Alex is twenty and will never fix her broken nose. Alex is twenty and watches Nicke undress for the hundredth time, revelling in the utilitarian reveal of broad, heavy hips and deep chest and the perfect peaks of Nicke’s small breasts. Alex is twenty and can hardly believe she gets to touch her this time.

They don’t make it to the bedroom, pushing Alex’s mess onto the floor so Nicke can throw herself on the couch, and Alex can sink to her knees and spread Nicke’s perfect thighs and lose the last of her lipstick between her legs with Nicke’s left hand still twisted in her hair.

-

Alex wants to know her.

It’s different than wanting to fuck her, though maybe they’re conjoined impulses in her, tangled like a twisted bedsheet and long, pale legs. Alexandra Ovechkina wants to lie in bed in the watery morning and watch Lara Backstrom wake up slowly, her hair a wild mess over her shoulders.

Alex also kind of wants her to sit on her face, which is an infinitely more achievable goal. “Hey,” she says, her own voice sounding strange with the anticipation of a good idea. “Come here?”

Nicke looks at her through the sweep of her pale eyelashes, only half awake. “Why?”

“So I can wake you up properly.”

Nicke smiles at her, face half-buried in the pillow, but even halfway, even with a half-crescent of lips and teeth, Alex wants, just wants. It’s not a smirk. It’s not even halfway to one; it’s the kind of smile Alex thinks might only happen when Nicke is too close to sleep to be guarded. “How?” Nicke mumbles. “Are you coffee?”

Alex touches a finger to the tip of her nose. “Just go with it,” she says. “If you hate it, you can check me later. Or tell me to stop.”

“I’m going to check you anyway,” Nicke points out, sleepily, but she makes a pleased noise when Alex grabs her by the hips, fingers pressing into heavy muscle and soft skin, and drags her bodily up and over, positioning her kneeling and open before hauling her down to meet Alex’s lips.

Nicke’s thighs start to tremble around the time Alex holds her just still enough to tease her open with the very tip of her tongue, long, light strokes that are going nowhere fast but make Nicke perilously wet and leave her sinking down with a sigh.

Alex can hardly breathe and can’t imagine anything better, surrounded by heat and skin and the soft mass of Nicke’s hair. Distantly, she thinks Nicke might be saying something, but Alex presses her tongue harder, just the way Nicke likes, finally, and Nicke takes the hint. She lets Alex take the rest of her weight, and it’s perfect, it’s long and slow and breathless and when Nicke comes it’s the furthest thing from urgent.

Nicke rolls off her after a second, and Alex sees stars as she breathes in. “Good morning,” she offers, when she has her breath back.

Nicke drags a long strand of Alex’s hair away from where it’s stuck to her face and kisses her, taking the breath Alex has only just regained, heedless of the wetness of Alex’s lips. “I’ll still check you,” she says, when she pulls back.

“I know.” Alex lays a hand over where her fingers have left an imprint in Nicke’s thighs, fading red and pink as she strokes over them. Nicke colours, that telltale blush Alex loves so much spreading in blotches across her round cheeks. “What?”

Nicke swallows, staring at her. “It’s like— every time you look at me it’s like you’re… like how you look when you’re winning.”

Alex wants to laugh, but she holds it in, stroking up from Nicke’s thigh to her hip, her waist, the rounded thickness of her shoulder until she’s cupping her cheek. “You want me to stop?”

Nicke closes her eyes. “No.”

In the abstract, Alex should worry about how easy it is to do this, to throw herself into Nicke and hope the collision creates something wonderful, but it’s the only way she knows how to be. Alex isn’t subtle and Alex isn’t beautiful and Alex isn’t ready to stop wanting her. She wouldn’t begin to know how. She brushes her thumb against the corner of Nicke’s lips. “Just say when,” she offers.

-

Nicke snaps her a pass and it goes wide.

Nicke takes a hit she doesn’t see coming, and Alex watches it happen, watches her get shunted into the boards like a six-foot rag doll and tumble onto the ice, only to right herself with messy-looking fury, collecting her helmet and shoving it back on over her sweat-dark hair, mouthguard sticking out between her teeth.

Any alarm Alex feels for it dissolves when Nicke skates back to the bench, shaking it off, and Alex follows for the line change. Nicke’s fine, physically. Neither of them are strangers to the bruise-and-bust cycle of professional men’s hockey, because if they don’t show their war wounds on a weekly basis people think they’re being coddled.

Alex isn’t sure when they became a “they” by anything more than default, but they have; on a line they’re electric, Nicke the calm lodestone in the middle, low to the ice and faster than she looks, solid and steady, usually so accurate Alex thinks she might have missed a career as a marksman, if she’d even had to do Sweden’s military service. Nicke hasn’t missed a pass that easy since her second week here, after she’d stopped playing with the rigid perfectionism of someone aware they’d have to be twice as good for half the praise and before they really clicked.

“What’s eating you?” Seryozha asks, spitting water onto the floor like a fucking animal before he offers Nicke the bottle. “You look like a zombie today, buck the fuck up.”

On her other side, Alex is prepared to defend her, leaning over into her space, steam rising from their padding and sweat dripping off her hair as she takes the water bottle out of Seryozha’s fingers, but Nicke goes a terrible, blotchy pink, flush high on her round cheeks, and shoves Alex back into her spot. “Stop distracting me,” she mutters. “You’re— stop it.” She leaves her hand on Alex’s padding, fingers dipping into the well where it gaps at her neck and scraping her fingernails over Alex’s nape. Alex, dumbstruck, is lit like an emergency flare, entire focus narrowed to the press of Nicke’s nails against her sweat-slicked skin.

Seryozha looks between them and takes back his water bottle. “Did you take one to the head?”

“That’s— no, I’m fine,” Nicke insists, snatching it back before she shoves Alex away. “Can you at least try to be in the right place next time?”

Alex waggles her eyebrows at her, leaning as far back as she can and stretching her arms up so the padding covers her neck, presses up under her chin. “Anything you want, Nicky,” she says.

Nicke swallows her mouthful of water, staring at Alex’s mouth.

“Can I have my fucking water back?” Seryozha plucks it out of Nicke’s slack fingers.

Alex is about to say something, anything, just to see the high blush under Nicke’s natural pink-cheeked flush of exertion, but then the lines are changing and they’re out again, all three of them, that blistering speed of hockey catching up to Alex, mingling with the low hum of delighted arousal that sings under he skin for the rest of the period as Nicke slaps puck after puck right onto her tape, a look of intense, furious concentration in her unblinking eyes.

They might win, or they might lose, and an hour later Alex would be hard pressed to remember which for once in her life, shoved up against the back wall of the gear closet with one leg wrapped around Nicke’s hips and Nicke’s fingers buried in her to the last knuckle and Nicke’s teeth set against her collarbone, biting down.

Alex comes in a flood, Nicke’s thumb just the right side of rough and her lips wet against her skin.

“Fuck you,” Nicke gasps, kissing her, wet and messy, stroking her through the aftershocks. “You play like that and still…”

“Still what?” Alex drags her closer, hands spread over her back. Everything smells like clean sweat and bodies, like rubber and tape and warm skin.

Nicke makes a wordless noise that could mean anything.

“Still make you stare, miss passes?” Nicke’s silent outrage only lasts as long as it takes for Alex to turn them, for Alex to duck her head and take Nicke’s chin in her hand and make eye contact, lowlit and knowing. “Make you watch me, not the game?”

Nicke braces her hands on Alex’s shoulders like she might shove her off, but she doesn’t, she just grips harder. “It won’t happen again.”

Alex grins down at her and slides a thigh between her legs. Nicke’s breath hitches, her nails digging into Alex’s bare skin.

“You didn’t answer my question,” Alex tells her, thumb brushing the corner of Nicke’s lips.

“Yes,” Nicke whispers.

Alex lifts her hip, presses closer, everything heat and friction and the sound Nicke makes when Alex finally slips a hand between them.

-

They play their first season together and they win more than they lose. It’s not nothing.

“Match made in fucking heaven” gets thrown around the locker room the first time Nicke sets Alex up for a hat trick, assisting on two out of three, and Alex stretches until her shoulders pop, feeling the drag of heavy muscle and the leanness of a long season. She settles into her body with the pure consciousness of long and deliberate habit. She knows every inch of herself, every tic and weakness and every sacrificed inch of skin, but she knows her strengths too.

She locks eyes with Nicke across the room and stretches her legs out in front of her, crossing her ankles, bare feet and Dynamo-blue toenails reaching into the centre of the room. “Well boys, I’m single,” she offers.

“You’re a bitch, you know that, right?” Seryozha crows, elbowing her in the ribs. “A great big fucking bitch.”

“I know,” Alex says, watching Nicke divest herself of her upper-body padding by dumping the whole thing on the floor to sort it piece by piece. “And I’m pretty, too.”

Nicke doesn’t laugh with the rest of them, lips pressed tightly together as she’s jostled.

Alex showers with everyone else. At this point, if they want to stare, fucking let them. It’s nothing they haven’t seen, and even the newest boys learn quickly that ogling Alex gets them nothing but benched. There’s a strange kind of power to it, this careful dance of resistance. She’s seen enough swinging cocks to last her an entire lifetime, and if she has no interest in any of them, that’s for her to know and keep, and as good a reason as any to look. It’s strangely reassuring how many shapes and sizes they come in. It makes her feel as though her own body isn’t quite so aberrant to the environment, not such alien fauna after all, with her big, heavy breasts and dark hair and thick muscle.

Showering has never been distracting until Nicke. Her body is all curves, all gold and pink and smooth. She has no tattoos, no big scars, nothing to interrupt the sweeping arcs that make up her back.

Alex doesn’t stare. Nicke does, sometimes, when she thinks Alex isn’t looking.

As usual, Alex is the last one out, taking her time at the mirror, braiding her hair into a long rope to hang over her shoulder while she decides what colours to wear into the night. Maybe she’ll get a drink somewhere loud. Maybe she’ll catch someone’s eye.

Nicke comes up behind her. Alex isn’t so optimistic as to assume this will be a repeat of last time. They’re a match made in heaven. They’re teammates. They’re dangerous together, from a certain point of view.

“Why do you let them call you a bitch?” Nicke asks.

Alex decides on silver, pulling the palette out from under the jumbled mass of sample-sized lipsticks, but she doesn’t open it right away. She looks at Nicke in the mirror, then she turns around.

Nicke looks like she always does: unadorned and pale, but there’s something in the set of her faint eyebrows that kills Alex’s flippancy before she manages to say a word. “Because I’d rather hear it to my face,” Alex says. “I’d rather be in on it.”

“It’s ugly,” Nicke says, casting for the word.

Alex shrugs. “So? They’re not going to stop.”

Nicke hitches her bag higher on her shoulder. “I was the only girl on my team. In Sweden. They didn’t call me anything to my face.”

“Was it better behind your back?”

“Not really,” Nicke says, raising her chin. “Will you drive me home?”

Somehow, Alex liked it better when Nicke was imperious, when it was an order and not a request. “I am a bitch,” she says, aiming for casual and missing by a mile. “Tell me to drive you home again.”

Nicke drops her bag and kicks it towards Alex. “Drive me home.”

Alex grins at her, and bends to pick it up.

-

“It looks too good for the KHL if its best team has girls on it,” Alex says. “They won’t let us go.”

“Never underestimate the power of propaganda.” Nicke stops taking tiny bites out of the chocolate bar she’s pretending not to eat as she emails her agent in Stockholm. “Russia’s been crowing about it for long enough that it’s an insult now, isn’t it?”

Alex sometimes forgets that Nicke’s attention to detail spreads itself into every corner of her; she’s got a knack for calm that makes it seem sometimes like she’s not paying attention. Alex is the one whose spaces are filled with books, who finds unadulterated escape in looking to places other than hockey for fun occasionally, and who has been quietly toying with the idea of enrolling in something for the fuck of it, just to please herself. She forgets that Nicke reads voraciously too, but just doesn’t talk about it.

Nicke’s also Swedish. Maybe it goes without saying, but she’s learned Russian so well and so quickly that her accent just seems normal to Alex, and her strange syntax is just a quirk, a note of beauty in her voice. It would be disingenuous for Alex to claim she forgets that too, but it’s background noise until Nicke says something or does something that sets her apart, like genuinely enjoy blood pudding, or bring Swedish vodka home with her, or watch TV with the baffled little frown she gets sometimes when someone is spouting nonsense and she isn’t sure it’s worth correcting them. She’s not from here, not the way Alex is. Sometimes it gives her an outsider’s view.

Alex, splayed on the floor of their kitchen with a foam roller torturing her glutes, looks up at her and sees her looking back, waiting for an answer. “They won’t sign us,” Alex says. “They’ll invite us to training camps and send us all over the states and in the end they’ll send us home and spout some bullshit about it not being a good fit, or us not showing enough aggression on the ice.”

Alex speaks from experience. At eighteen, she went to two, and got sent home from both with the nicest of feedback: great player, insane stick handling, doesn’t backcheck enough, not NHL material. It had stung, more so because Alex had already been playing professional hockey for two years when most of the infants she’d skated with had been dicking around in the ass end of nowhere on the junior circuit. The only difference was their dicks, and as much as Alex resents everything about that, it hurts more that their feedback was so patently untrue. She just wants to be recognised as better-than, and being arbitrarily labelled less skilled when she isn’t is tantamount to mortal injury. “Not ready for North American hockey,” had plagued her for weeks, even after going back to Moscow with a smile on her face for the cameras.

“I took Brynas to court,” Nicke says, taking another tiny bite out of her dark chocolate, a crumb of it clinging to her lip before she dabs it away with her tongue. Alex momentarily forgets how to speak, much less parse what Nicke is saying. Nicke glances away from her screen, and the look she sends Alex says she knows exactly how embarrassing Alex is being. “I hit all the standards. I took them to court for it. Everyone in management hated me.”

She says it as though it’s utterly matter-of-fact, but Alex aches for her; at least for Alex, even if she was a publicity stunt, she was a willing one. To be taken seriously, she’s had to fight for it, had to be the best of the best, but at least the KHL backed her. At least they took it as an opportunity for a fuck-you play. “Nicky…” Alex doesn’t know what to say, except for the obvious. It’s probably all over her face, plain to anyone who knows how to read it.

“You never wondered why I came to Russia?” Nicke asks, watching her.

“Maybe I didn’t want to jinx it,” Alex confesses.

Nicke colours, hands still on the keyboard. “You can’t just—”

“I can.”

Nicke bites her lip, and Alex is hit by a surge of riotous warmth. Nicke hasn’t showered and the sleeves of her shirt have been lost with prejudice to a pair of scissors. She has chocolate in her teeth. Alex will follow her wherever she wants to go, and if that means forcing her way into the NHL, well, Alex knows how to bull into things with panache. It’s a gift. Persistence comes in plenty of forms, and if this is what Nicke wants to do, Alex will help her do it. “So, if we go to the NHL, who are we signing with?”

Nicke closes her laptop. “We?”

Alex loves her so much she feels it’s only fair to give her shit for it sometimes, lest Alex combust somehow, pent-up everything just burning her up into a pile of ash and fake eyelashes. “No, just you, heading off to America all alone, ready with an international civil suit and only one t-shirt to wear for five days. Would you even remember to pack a bra for practice? You’ll call me every day going “Alex, FedEx me some duct tape for my shoes, and also my suit, for court.” Of course “we.” What would I do without you?”

“You’d be fine,” Nicke says quietly. “You were fine before.”

“I don’t want to train new idiot boys to pass to me,” Alex tells her, aiming at serious. “I don’t want to train new idiot boys.”

“We picked the wrong sport for that.” Nicke pauses, knee bouncing under the table. You’d really rather come with me than stay in Moscow?”

“Moscow’s not the same without you,” Alex says. “I don’t want to be where you aren’t.”

“Sometimes you—” Nicke smiles at her, the one Alex likes the most, secretly, when her face cracks open and her eyes crease into her cheeks. “You’re ridiculous.”

Alex, balanced on the foam roller shirtless and in her favourite underwear, the pink lace ones that have rhinestones in the shape of a heart on the front, falls off it with an undignified thump. She hasn’t taken her makeup off yet, and she thinks maybe it’s time to re-paint her toenails. She feels great, lying on her back looking up Nicke’s nose, listening to her laugh at her. “Yeah. I’ll be as ridiculous as you want.”

Nicke kneels next to her. Alex is captivated by the way her shorts pull tight across the front of her thighs, the way her hair falls out from behind her ears, the way she’s looking at her, as though Alex is someone worth her focus. She strokes her hair back behind her ear, and Alex is still caught by surprise when Nicke bends down to kiss her, lips soft and tasting of sugar.

“Did you borrow my chapstick?” Alex asks, breathless.

“Maybe,” Nicke answers, lips brushing Alex’s. “It’s your own fault for leaving them all over the fucking bathroom.”

“You’ll have to help me pack for America.”

“I’m going to throw them all away,” Nicke threatens, running a hand over Alex’s side. “Every single one.”

Alex drags Nicke the rest of the way down, laughing.

-

“I thought you were straight,” Nicke confesses, months after she’s moved to Moscow but only weeks after the end of the season, in no hurry to leave Alex’s bed, with its mountains of pillows and soft, lilac sheets. “When I met you. You were all— it’s hard not to look at you.”

Alex would be offended, except for how that’s always been a card to her advantage, no matter how badly it sits or how ugly it feels, shard lodged sideways in her chest digging in anew every time someone asks her if it’s hard to find a man when she’s better than them at hockey. Alex has never had any interest in finding a man, but she knows the rest of the joke, too. Of course she doesn’t like them. She sees too much of them. The last part, she can only take as a compliment. Alex makes a point of being looked at.

“Most people do,” Alex says, shrugging one shoulder. Her hand rests, wide and square, on the soft rise of Nicke’s belly, thumb brushing the very bottom of her navel. Nicke shifts under her palm, warm and solid and perfect. It’s rare that Alex gets to keep her in bed. Over the last few months, Alex has learned so many things about her, but very little that’s come directly from her. Alex knows she gets up reluctantly but forces herself out of bed anyway and that she only seems to wear boxer-briefs in the same colour grey no matter what. Alex knows she takes her coffee black like a fucking heathen and is wary of dogs but will stop in the street to pat puppies. Alex knows she doesn’t brush her hair, and has done it for her, Nicke pressed between her knees with a sour expression held onto by will as she softens under Alex’s fingers. “Tell me about your exes?”

“Not much to tell,” Nicke says, staring at the ceiling, chewing contemplatively on her bottom lip. “None of them were— you know. They were nice. They were easy.”

“Okay, but…What were they like?”

Nicke inhales deeply, body rising under Alex’s palm. “Why do you want to know so badly?”

Alex rubs a circle with her thumb, Nicke’s smooth skin firm. Alex half expects her not to answer, but Nicke smiles and closes her eyes. Alex has learned that she likes to be touched, almost as much as Alex likes to touch her. She thinks she understands; the kind of contact they’re used to is segmented, bound by unwritten rules. Alex has rough-housed with everyone who’s tried it, but nobody tries it anymore, and she’s glad. That’s a boys’ game, and she only has a temporary visa to that world at the best of times, and wouldn’t want to stay. Nicke likes to be touched with fingertips, with soft brushes of lips, with the kind of reverence Alex is beginning to realise she might not be able to deny, if Nicke asks. “I’m curious,” Alex confesses. “What’s it like in Sweden?”

“It’s fine. Better than here, if you’re queer.”

She says it so matter-of-factly, as though it’s easy. Alex moves closer, spreads herself along Nicke’s side, splays her fingers over Nicke’s ribs. “Hockey players?”

“Some. I had a girlfriend at school. Ingrid. She was older. She liked horses.”

“You have a type,” Alex teases. “I can see her now, oh, Ingrid, blonde all over, I bet her thighs were like—”

“Careful,” Nicke says, beginning to smile, a tiny hint of teeth between her lips. “She taught me some things you might not enjoy.”

Alex doubts that very, very much. Anything Nicke wants to do to her, Alex thinks she might let her. It would be frightening, if Alex had less of a sense of herself. As it is, it’s painful enough to wonder how obvious she’s being, heart out and bleeding on her sleeve for Nicke to seize, if she wants it.

Alex laughs at the absurdity of it, that Nicke might have something Alex would find too much, too intense, too anything to be unenjoyable, even if she might not like it all.

Nicke grabs her wrist, stopping Alex’s careless petting just as she’s brushing her knuckles along the underside of Nicke’s breast, coaxing out goosebumps.

Alex prickles all over, just from that. “I’ll tell you if I don’t like it,” she says, letting her wrist go slack in Nicke’s grip.

Nicke pulls in a shuddering breath before she rolls away and shoves Alex off the side of the bed with both feet.

Alex lands in a tumble on the floor, stunned. Nicke leans over the edge, propped on her elbows. “Still fine?”

Alex, her mouth abruptly dry, can only nod.

“Oh,” Nicke breathes, eyes suddenly wide. She reaches down and brushes a strand of hair out of Alex’s face, placing it deliberately behind her ear. Alex holds very, very still, staring up at her, hardly believing the look on Nicke’s face. If Alex has been obsessed with her since she arrived in Moscow, maybe it’s been obvious before now, but she hasn’t bothered to hope that Nicke might return even a fraction of it. From here, from below, Alex thinks maybe Nicke looks a little awestruck, a little hungry.

Nicke’s fingers skim across Alex’s cheekbone, coming to rest on her lips. “Don’t speak,” she orders. “Not a sound.”

Alex presses a soft kiss to the very tip of her index finger, and Nicke gasps, softly, and slips it between Alex’s parted teeth.

It would feel like falling, if Alex wasn’t already on the floor.

-

“Move in with me,” Alex says, after, when they’re back in bed.

“And live in your filth?”

“It’s not filth, it’s squalor.”

Nicke laughs, bright and easy. “Will you clean it?”

Alex, scalp tingling from the grip Nicke had on her hair and sore all over in the shape of her teeth, lays her head on Nicke’s lap. “You can always make me,” she offers.

“Okay,” Nicke says, after a while, laying a hand on the back of Alex’s neck.

-

Russia and Sweden meet in the semi-finals of the World Cup the year after Nicke comes to play in Moscow.

They fly to Kladno together. Alex should go with the Russian team, but the idea of Nicke flying alone, or with one of her resentful countrymen makes her want to be reckless. She gets shit for it and gives it right back. “Scoping out the enemy,” she says, when she has to. “Maybe I’ll keep her awake, and then we’ll win for sure.”

Later, when Nicke sees the footage, she’ll be furious, but not really. It’s one of the things Alex can’t put a finger on about her; Nicke is honest in her emotions, but not the way Alex is. Alex will jump wholly from feeling to feeling as though they were stones fording a river. Nicke always has her fingers in the stream, directing the current, and while Alex thinks she can read her now, she’s still surprised at how hard Nicke laughs at her when she discovers Alex has had someone upgrade their flight.

She also still falls asleep on Alex’s shoulder somehow, traveling shirt creasing under the waistcoat she’s wearing so she doesn’t have to wear a bra, her mouth open and her hair soft against Alex’s bare neck.

They split at the airport, and Alex ends up in the room next to Sasha Semin’s at the hotel, so at least he can buffer her from some of the jeering. “Did you and your girlfriend join the mile high club?” He demands, dragging her into his twin to ply her with vodka from the mini bar. “Tell me everything.”

Alex, her makeup greasing from travel and her feet sore from walking in heels too high to be practical but high enough to be fun, cracks the top off the inferior Czech vodka he tosses her and kicks off her shoes. “Remember when it was dangerous to tell each other secrets?”

“Please,” Sasha says, already decked head-to-toe in their Russia gear, “it’s not a secret.”

“It better be,” Alex says, suddenly cold, bare toes clammy on the terrible hotel carpet. “It can’t not be.”

Sasha drinks his vodka in silence, looking at Alex’s feet. “Your nail polish is cracking,” he tells her. “You’re embarrassing our country on an international stage.”

“I’m not the one betraying the Motherland by moving to America,” Alex says. “Tell me about Washington, go on.”

Sasha toasts her with his second little bottle, tossing the first in the trash with admirable accuracy. “It’s full of Americans,” he gripes. “My god, Sandra. You’d fucking die. They smile all the time, even when they don’t mean it, and the food is like… if you took everything that was never meant to be fried and fried it.”

“We have McDonald’s in Moscow too, you know.”

“Yeah, but somehow it’s different,” he gripes. “But you know, it could be worse.”

“How so?”

“You could be there making us all look bad.” He pokes her with the toe of his running shoe. “Soon enough though, eh?”

“We’ll see,” Alex allows. “Let’s just beat the Canadians, then I’ll think about America.”

“You’re lucky you don’t have to do military service,” Sasha says, flopping back on the bed. “Whole thing’s a clusterfuck.”

Alex doesn’t have to say that if she had to do national service she’d be in a different position entirely. “High treason,” she says instead, stealing a bottle of gin.

They cruise through the Americans and the Finns in elimination, and Alex hardly sees Nicke. If she shows up at Sweden’s practices when they don’t overlap with Russia’s, she can always claim she’s taking notes, which is exactly what she says to Nicke when she skates over and leans against the divider, mouthguard flicking out from between her teeth. “Espionage?”

“Scouting the competition.”

Nicke smacks her on the top of the head with one sweaty glove. “You’re blending in. Are you sick?”

Alex has scrubbed herself clean for this, and is just in her Russia gear and a long braid, end of it coiled around her fingers.

“I never blend in,” she insists, affronted. “You look good. Fast.”

“Scared?”

Alex thinks she might be teasing, but she’s not sure enough to stake a bet on it. “No,” she says, honestly, “but I’m not going to go easy on you.”

Nicke shoves her mouthguard back between her teeth. “I’ll kill you if you do.”

“Promises, promises,” Alex whispers. “See you after?”

“See you after,” Nicke echoes, skating away backwards to where her team is yelling something in rapid Swedish.

Two days later the Swedes go down 3-2 in overtime, and Alex doesn’t even try to make amends on the ice, letting Nicke bump her frostily on the way out. Alex doesn’t try to hide her smile either. It feels too good to win, and it feels even better when two of those goals were hers. There’s no centre better than Nicke, but Alex takes it as a sign that they’re better together than they are apart. If she’d had Nicke to her right, they would never have gone to OT. Playing for Russia is something Alex does with pride, each and every time, but there’s pride and then there’s preference, and sometimes those two things don’t coexist easily.

Sweden plays for the bronze and Russia plays for the gold, and in the end only one of them wins, but they both come home with medals. Alex meets her at the airport in Kladno and Nicke hands her her bag with a sigh and shoves her hair behind her ears. “I’m tired,” she says, lifting her chin. “Congratulations on silver.”

Alex folds her into a hug, bags bumping against her back, Nicke’s soft front pressing warm through the fabric of Alex’s dress. Nicke accepts it without grumbling, holding her just as tightly.

“I’d kill someone for some snus right now,” Nicke admits, tugging the end of Alex’s braid.

“It’ll rot your gums,” Alex tells her, in no rush to pull back.

-

There are complications with moving to America; there are always complications. Alex has watched an endless number of her most talented team-mates move off to the NHL. Sometimes she hears from guys in Toronto, in New York, as far afield as Arizona. It doesn’t often pay to be the kind of person who hates to lose touch, but sometimes she gets pictures from the desert, or quick messages about how terrible it is to be in the air all time, as though she doesn’t have to travel for Dynamo, and wouldn’t kill any of them and take their place.

Well, maybe not Zhenya in Pittsburgh. If she was on a team in America, she knows herself well enough to understand that she’d want to be the star, and would have to be to be worth her airfare.

Then she gets a message from Sasha Semin.

“Nicky!” She yells, knowing she’s around somewhere from the sound of a hammer from somewhere on the mezzanine. “Come down!”

“I’m almost done, you can put up with the noise for another—”

“It’s important!”

The hammering stops, replaced by the tread of unhurried feet on the stairs, and then Alex has to remind herself that she has news because Nicke is wearing a pair of her eternal boxers and nothing else, hair clinging to the side of her neck and her left hand curled around the haft of a small nail hammer. “I was hanging our medals,” Nicke says, when Alex takes too long to stop staring. “You turned the thermostat up again, didn’t you?”

Alex nods, entirely speechless. There’s a sheen of sweat between Nicke’s breasts and a soft flush in her cheeks and Alex wants to push her into the wall. “You know what, it can wait,” Alex says, before she does exactly that. Nicke drops the hammer with a muffled thump, and Alex barely has time to be thankful it didn’t hit their toes before Nicke is laughing and kissing her back.

“Did you really have—” Nicke cuts herself off with a little gasp as Alex tugs at the waistband of her boxers. “Do you—”

“What was that?”

“Fuck you,” Nicke mutters, leaning into Alex’s shoulder before cupping her breasts, her hands warm even through the padded lace of Alex’s bra and the clinging sheen of her shirt.

“Sasha Semin says he thinks Washington might be open.” Alex reaches around and drags her shirt off one-handed. “He has to stay and do his national service.”

Nicke freezes completely. “You want to—“

“It can wait five minutes,” Alex allows.

Nicke hitches a laughing little breath and shoves Alex away. “Show me.”

-


	2. Chapter 2

Washington is nothing like Alex thought it would be and everything she might have imagined. She might have, at some point, pictured someone coming at Nicke with a sponge full of foundation and Nicke recoiling like it was acid runoff, and she might, at some point, have laughed, but in the end, Nicke consents to be minimally painted and have her picture taken next to Alex holding a hideous blue Capitals jersey with her number on it, just like Alex’s.

If Alex weren’t using both hands to hold hers up she’d be grabbing for Nicke’s. The photo she ends up keeping is the one her agent emails her later, of her leaning into Nicke with a huge grin and Nicke almost laughing, scrubbing at the lipstick mark on her cheek where Alex kissed her.

-

“Why did we decide to do this again?”

“We have to speak English,” Alex reminds her. “English, Nicky.” Her accent is terrible, she knows, but it’s even more frustrating to know that they could easily communicate with their lingua franca, the one in which Nicke’s variety and inventiveness of curses has expended monthly and the one in which Alex has never said “I love you” but could, in a hundred different ways.

“It’s stupid,” Nicke grumbles, before she refocuses on the camera watching them. “They’ve been following us all week.”

“Do you want me to distract them?”

“Don’t flash them, Alex,” Nicke says, before she turns back to the documentary crew. “Alex is not allowed to flash.”

The director laughs into her clipboard. “I’ll take that into account. Are you guys ready to hit the ice?”

“Always,” Alex says.

The cameras love Alex. Alex loves the cameras. It’s a different relationship than she had to them in Moscow, because here she is in no danger of saying anything dangerous by accident that can’t be shrugged off with a sheepish grin and the common excuse of idiosyncratic fluency. It’s safer, in its own way.

Nicke stands behind her, slips off the screen, lets Alex do the talking. Luckily, she talks enough for both of them, and against national pride and the objective lack of success of the Capitals, Washington loves her for it.

It helps that Alex and Nicke, together, have racked up a points streak the likes of which Washington has never seen, faster and leaner and more fun to watch than anyone was willing to gamble on before

It makes it easy to pull Nicke into the frame post-game for a sweaty hug, and easy to go home with her after.

It makes it easy to move for her, to take it on for her, because Alex is long past pretending at anything other than devotion.

When they get home after every full day of press and practice, Alex still gets to watch Nicke, still gets to rest her head in her lap and let Nicke pull her hair, still gets to wake her up slowly and laugh into her skin.

-

In all Alex’s years of obsessively watching tape, nothing compares to the reality of being flipped over from the hips by some twenty-year-old Canadian with a mean streak.

She lands on her back, mercifully only having the wind knocked out of her. The rest of her seems fine. She forces herself up. If she were anyone else, she could take a minute, let the stop in play wash over her, but she rolls onto all fours gasping. Her mouthguard falls out, so she grabs it, shoves it back in, and gives a broad thumbs-up to thunderous cheering.

The Penguins don’t seem overly concerned, but her new team-mates make a rush to grab her. She waves them off, knowing better. The announcers have to see her move under her own power. The coaches have to see it. She’s not injured. She can take it.

“You okay?” Nicke mutters, knowing better than to touch her.

“I’m going to kill him,” Alex tells her. “Fuck him and his low centre of gravity, if I had an ass like that—”

“You do,” Nicke points out. “Speak English.”

“Always fine,” Alex pronounces. “Can we play hockey?”

There’s a chorus of laughter. Greenie —tall and sweet and perhaps a little bit gone for Nicke, which Alex can sympathise with, even if it sometimes makes her want to puff all her metaphorical feathers— claps her on the shoulder. “You’re a machine,” he says. “We’ll kill him, if you want.”

“I do it,” Alex assures him. “Is my turn.”

Alex fully intends to follow through and get her first fighting major in a years-long professional career. She’s even planning it, waiting for the lines to change, but it’s Nicke, stealthy and agile and much, much bigger than she looks, who throws the first punch.

They end up in the bin together, and Alex hooks an arm around her sweaty neck after she’s spat all the blood out, overcome with delight. “Did you break your hand?”

“What do you take me for?” Nicke flexes her grazed knuckles. “I know how to throw a punch, unlike some people.”

“You’ll have to teach me,” Alex says, overcome with laughter.

“So you can go around starting shit just to prove you can?”

“Glass houses, Nicky.” Alex waves at their opponent, glowering furiously across the glass. “Do you think he’s mad he got beaten up by girls?”

“I don’t care.” Nicke grins, her gums still stained a brighter pink.

-

It’s an intense dose of irony that she loses a tooth, not to a fist, but to a high stick at the wrong time, someone skating by in passing and getting her right in the middle of her mouth. There’s not even a question of a penalty. It’s an accident.

When she yanks it out, Nicke is the only one who laughs, holding her hand out for the broken enamel. “I’m framing this,” she whispers, folding it into a tissue one of the trainers hands her.

“No hope of putting it back?”

“It’s in pieces, Alex.”

Alex tongues at the place where it used to be and shrugs. “Think I could get away with leaving it?”

“Depends how much shit you want to read about yourself.”

“I can see it now,” Alex says, around the ice-pack. “Alexandra Ovechkina somehow gets uglier, mirrors all across Washington in danger of cracking.”

Nicke doesn’t laugh, still holding the broken tooth like it’s vital evidence from a murder scene. “Get a fake one,” she says. “Make it out of diamonds. A great big ‘8’ on it in rubies.”

“Perfect.” Her face aches, but she smiles anyway before the trainers hustle her off the bench. “Win for me!”

Nicke just tucks the tooth into Alex’s glove and hands it to her. “I’ll try.”

When she gets home, she takes a long bath.

Management offered them separate billets, at the beginning, Nicke with Michael Nylander and Alex with the GM, but Nicke had quietly vetoed, insisting that their living situation wasn’t going to change along with everything else. They’ve got an apartment downtown that Nicke found, on the fifteenth floor with three bathrooms, two walk-in closets and too many bedrooms. Neither of them ever use the kitchen, and Nicke has waged a war of attrition against the explosion of Alex’s suitcases.

She uses Alex’s bathroom every morning, wiping lipstick off the counters with performative rage and stacking Alex’s makeup into little pyramids beside the sink that Alex is destined to knock over.

Alex has an icepack on her face and a glass of vodka with ice getting slowly warmer on the marble bath siding when Nicke comes in.

She sits on the side of the bath and dips her fingers in the water, already going pink in the steam.

Alex says nothing, letting her look. There’s a peculiar kind of intimacy to this, submitting herself to Nicke’s gaze in all her bruised, damaged exhaustion. Nicke rests a hand on Alex’s knee, sticking out of the few remaining lilac-scented bubbles, and strokes a thumb over the long scar puckering over the crease of it, cupping the bruise over the kneecap. Of anyone in the world, Nicke is the one who knows best what it’s like to live in a body like hers, she thinks. Nicke knows what it takes to keep skating and knows what invisible demands she makes of herself, just to make it seem effortless when it isn’t. Nicke knows what it’s like to be endlessly vivisected and to keep putting herself back on the table anyway. She got used to being a good-natured stunt, in Russia. She got used to being so good at hockey that the jokes became the press and the fans laughing with her, getting behind her when she took the jersey for Russia, looking the other way when it came to Nicke, her best friend, her room-mate, her centre. She isn’t used to America’s hunger for blood yet, or how they’re endlessly compared, as though they play the same kind of hockey, as though they’re the same person in different skins. She’s not used to not being able to construct her own image, stymied by a torturous, circuitous language and the sheer volume of attention. She doesn’t know how Nicke stands it.

“How’s your face?” Nicke asks, taking the vodka and sipping it. “Ugh, it’s warm.”

“Shouldn’t drink on painkillers, the doctors were very adamant.”

“Why even—”

“Tradition. National pride. Mama’s home remedy.” Alex mumbles thickly. “Hi.”

“Hi.” Nicke lets go of Alex and strips her shirt off, then her shorts. “I’m joining you, move your legs.”

“Will we fit?”

“Maybe if you weren’t a giant,” Nicke says, slipping into the water. “Come on, sit up.”

Alex does what she’s told, handing Nicke the ice-pack when she holds a hand out for it, letting Nicke move behind her and draw her flush between her legs, resting against her chest. Nicke presses the ice pack back to her face, and Alex finally relaxes completely, a knot unspooling under her right scapula she hadn’t even realised was there.

“Too hard?” Nicke asks.

“Perfect,” Alex tells her, closing her eyes.

-

Her first year in Washington, Alex gets invited to the All-Star Game.

“You should go,” Nicke says, elbows hooked over the edge of the conditioning pool at the gym. Alex gets momentarily transfixed by what the move does to her wet shoulders, and Nicke magnanimously allows her a second of distraction before she repeats herself. “Alex, you should go. You’ll have a great time. I hear everyone gets drunk.”

“But they’re idiots. They didn’t invite you.”

“The whole thing is a publicity stunt,” Nicke points out. “Not really my idea of fun.”

“It won’t be the same without you,” Alex insists, sticking her feet in the pool, even though she’s supposed to be upstairs on the bike. “Who’ll be brave enough to laugh at me when I dress up like Gretzky?”

“If you get killed by Canadians I won’t be responsible,” Nicke says, grabbing her ankle and tugging a little. “You should go. Make Russia proud. God knows we’re having a rough enough season.”

It’s true. Alex, with Nicke at her centre, is on some kind of fire, streaking in goal after goal and Nicke racking up the assists, but it’s not enough to drag them all the way up the league rankings, not the two of them, not on their own.

Maybe it’s the way the team is taking a while to coalesce, or maybe it really is all the publicity or the speculation that nobody wants to touch either of them on the ice, that if the Capitals wanted girls they had plenty in the US and Canada to choose from. Never mind that Alex and Nicke came from years of experience in a men’s league and both of them are bigger than plenty of the men they skate with. Maybe they want her to turn the All-Star down, as a test of hubris. “Will you watch?”

Nicke snorts. “No. I’ll take the weekend off and eat takeout on the Nylanders' couch. Can you believe their kid thinks he can beat me at ping-pong?”

“I can’t believe you’re feuding with a fifteen-year-old.”

“He’s fourteen.”

“He has a crush on you,” Alex sing-songs, before Nicke hauls her bodily into the pool.

Alex flies to Charlotte on the Friday night. She’s the only Capital, aside from their media team, and true to Nicke’s word, it is absolutely rammed with journalists. Luckily there are plenty of familiar faces to offset the constant track of cameras, much as Alex enjoys the attention, so Alex ends up lumped in with Zhenya for a couple of hilariously dumb promotional spots and Q&A’s. “Where’s your better half?” she asks him, when they’re taking a break for someone to come fix Alex’s lipstick and put a truly alarming amount of spray in her hair.

Zhenya coughs and makes a show of waving away the fumes, even though he comes from a radioactive wasteland and has the face to prove it. “He’s got an ear infection.”

“Is that ear infection a result of chickenitis?”

“That’s not even a word,” Zhenya gripes, before they have to get back on script. It takes Alex sixteen tries to pronounce “trial-by-fire” and by the end of it even Zhenya has lost most of his drink out his nose.

When Alex cleans up at the skills competition it feels like a real victory, even if it’s just over the other drunkards taking hits off her doctored water bottle. “You know what?” Weber slurs in her ear, accent thickened to near-unintelligibility by the vodka she’s smuggled in disguised as Gatorade, “you’re pretty good.”

“I know,” she tells him, shoving him off. “I beat you all the time.”

“Thought you’n the hot one were a package thing,” he explains, “but you’re pretty great, number eight.”

“I know,” she repeats, doing her best to decide whether it’s worth punching him in the face over that. Ultimately, it’s nothing she’s never heard before, but a part of her wishes there was a Best Hockey Fight portion of the game, just so she could throw it down. “See? It’s rhyme.”

“She’s drunk and she doesn’t speak English and she’s still smarter than you!” Giroux crows over the boards. “You’re doomed. She’ll win hardest shot next.”

She doesn’t, but two out of three isn’t too bad.

-

Alex gets home from the All-Star hungover and smudged under the eyes. She’s got at least three messages from people asking if she’s quitting her day job to write jingles now, attached to the video someone took on a cell phone of her laid out in the hallway at two in the morning in a tracksuit and Giroux’s Team Canada beanie, singing an ode to a slice of pepperoni pizza.

Nicke plays it to her in bed the next morning, singing along. She’s memorised it.

Alex kisses her silent, viciously hungover. “Shh. I already know I’m a genius.”

“Put some clothes on,” Nicke says. “We’re going to Home Depot. I want a new power drill.”

“Everything about that sounds terrible.”

“You can buy anything you want,” Nicke offers, poking Alex under the ribs, where she’s hellishly ticklish. Alex shrieks and rolls onto Nicke’s hand, trapping her by the arm. “Come on. Up. We have a workout later. You’ll feel better.”

“Fine, but I’m going to take as long as I like to get ready.”

“When do you not?” Nicke asks, yanking her arm out and climbing on top of her. She presses a warm kiss to the shell of Alex’s ear, drag of her fingers in Alex’s hair the best thing she’s felt all morning. “We can get those awful frappe things you like on the way.”

“Don’t malign my coffee choices, I’m an All-Star, I deserve the respect—”

“Get up,” Nicke orders, just a whisper in Alex’s ear. Alex’s entire overworked body snaps to attention, focused down to the fine-tuned thrill of Nicke’s lips brushing her skin and the weight of her pinning her to the mattress.

Alex gets up, but she takes an hour and a half to get ready, just because it makes Nicke mad.

After Home Depot Nicke drags her grocery shopping, but Alex, hangover fading into a low background hum masked with caffeine and contentment, just reapplies the lipstick Nicke kissed off her in the flooring aisle, tapping her feet to the universally inane noise of American radio.

-

“Mom! MOM! Look!”

“A kid is pointing at you,” Alex says to Nicke, surfacing from where she’s bent over the edge of the shopping cart, rearranging the frozen peas to Nicke’s exact specifications. “Try to look cool.”

“Mom it’s Alex Ovechkina! She’s real!”

Nicke smirks down at her. “Looks like she recognises your butt.”

Alex straightens up and waves at the kid, who shrieks and hides her face in both hands. She’s probably about seven, with a huge mop of curly black hair and big brown eyes, for what Alex saw of them. Her mother is looking at them both in abject apology. “I’m so sorry, her grandfather keeps trying to get her into hockey, and with you guys— girls— oh god, ladies? being on the team he’s finally succeeded. She has posters and everything. Hi. Sorry to bother you.”

“Is no problem,” Alex says, holding out a hand, dragging Nicke along by her grip on the cart. “This Nicky, she also very good at hockey.” Alex crouches down until she’s about the same height as the little girl. “Hello. You very good at spotting me.” She holds out a hand to where the kid is peering out between her fingers. “You like hockey? What your name?”

“Harriet.”

“Hi Harriet,” Alex says. “Want see something really really cool?”  
Harriet nods. Alex grins and flicks her fake tooth out with her tongue, pulling the bridge down until it’s invisible. Harriet screams with laughter and shoves her finger in Alex’s mouth, right where the tooth was.

“Harry, no! Oh my god, I am so sorry—“

Nicke wheezes gently, an explosion of breath that can only be a stifled laugh. Alex smiles at Harriet and shoves the bridge back. “See? Magic.”

“Harriet, we do NOT stick our fingers in—“

“It’s okay,” Alex says, “now we see your face, yes?” Harriet bites her lip. One of her front teeth is missing too, and Alex’s delight couldn’t possibly be measurable on less than a cosmic scale.

“What’s it like playing hockey?” Harriet asks. “Grandpa says you’re the best.”

“Your Grandpa is smart man.”

Harriet’s mother looks between the three of them as though she can’t decide who to chastise first. “I’ll take the picture,” Nicke offers, already holding out her hand for the phone.

“No! She has to be in it too,” Harriet insists. “Mom, please?”

“You lucky I have tooth today,” Alex says, letting Harriet hold her hand in a six-year-old’s death grip and manoeuvre her into place beside Nicke, who seems to be trying her very best not to burst out laughing for real, if the way her lips have gone tight and pinched is any indication. Alex reaches up and turns her hat backwards. “So we see your face,” she says, at Nicke’s sour look.

Harriet grabs Nicke’s hand too, and just as Alex was expecting, Nicke beams down at her, any awkwardness vanishing under the vicious onslaught of an adorable child in close proximity.

“She’s got our number, Nicky,” Alex tells her, as Harriet tugs on Alex’s blouse and boldly asks to be picked up, which Alex gamely does.

“What are you saying?” Harriet demands. “Are those words?”

“Is Russian,” Alex tells her. “Nicky, she Swedish, but together we speak Russian.”

“What’s Swedish?”

“I swear she goes to school,” her mother says, holding up her phone. “Smile, Harry, we have to leave them alone now.”

Alex and Nicke sign a box of cheerios and a carton of gogurt respectively. The pictures that surface later are of Alex holding a child too big to be picked up easily, all long limbs and big hair and adoration, and Nicke ignoring the camera in favour of grinning at them, her bob sticking out the bottom of her oversized hat. Alex’s lipstick is on her teeth from where Harriet smudged it, and she looks about seven feet tall, because even a trip around the store after Home Depot is a good reason for great shoes.

It’s a great picture.

It’s not the picture George emails to Alex later with a single question: “do we need to talk about this?”

-

When Alex turns sixteen, her mother takes her out to dinner.

It’s a rare treat to spend time with just her, and not the whole family, and as much as Alex loves her family, sometimes they’re a lot to deal with.

Alex won’t put up with Mikhail treating her like a child, but she’s as much his younger sister as she was Sergei’s, and it seems like nobody is ever willing to forget that she’s the youngest of them. She might be the one least like her mother, in some ways, but she’s also the one most likely to follow in her footsteps, and Alex has always wondered what would have happened if she’d chosen basketball like her, instead of a sport so tipped against women that only her determination and her sheer, awful love for it has kept her going. She’s often wondered what her mother thinks of her, but that’s not the kind of question any child can ask their parent without getting an answer that’s either dishonest or designed to dissolve the last strings of childhood.

She’s so much taller than her mother that she forgoes heels for the occasion, wanting not to tower over her. They go to a restaurant just off Red Square that Alex has never really noticed, taking the metro into the city and walking the rest of the way through GUM and out the other side in companionable silence.

The staff greet Tatiana Ovechkina by name, and she receives it like a countess, Alex thinks, nodding her acknowledgement as they’re shown to a table. “We’ll have two of the same,” Tatiana says, “and some vodka, to celebrate.”

When they’re ensconced, coats shed and Alex beginning to itch at the shoulders, her mother smiles at her, a quiet thing, but enough. Alex relaxes enough to smile back, reaching a hand across the table for Tatiana to take. “I didn’t know you were a regular, Mama.”

“There’s plenty you don’t know,” her mother says, grasping her fingers briefly before letting go to settle her napkin on her lap. The candlelight flickers across the plastered walls, revealing paintings too abstract for Alex’s taste. She supposes they must be pleasing to the eye, if she could actually see them, but the autumn darkness has closed in and the place is too intimate for a view. It has the curious effect of making her mother seem alone in the darkness, even though Alex is right there, and can see and hear other diners, the clatter of cutlery and the murmur of waiters announcing the specials a pleasant cover for silence.

“I should throw a party for my name day,” Alex says, twisting the end of her hair. “I’ll be signed by then. What do you think?”

Her mother laughs at her, deep creases by her mouth cutting lines into her skin. She doesn’t smile much but laughs often, and often at Alex, but it’s never based in malice. Alex invited it from her, the hand on the top of her head, the cutting comment that is the equivalent of an in-joke among them. Tatiana comes to her games and watches them alone, taking notes silently, and Alex is as good as she is in no small part because of her.

“What?” Alex asks. “Everyone would come. It would be the party of the year.”

“Undoubtedly,” her mother says. “You can do what you want when they sign you, Alexandra. Just remember, most people will be waiting for you to blow it. You don’t play on an even field.”

Alex, sobered, takes a gulp of water. “You think I shouldn’t?”

“I think…”

The waiter interrupts them, bring a first course of blinis and salmon, and something Alex thinks might be a mousse. She’s ravenous, but she’s always ravenous, and has mostly learned that her body will make its demands and it’s only up to her to manage how she satisfies them. She eats the first one delicately, picking it into small pieces with a knife and fork, much to her mother’s amusement.

“You’ve been making your own decisions for too long for me to tell you what to do,” Tatiana says, when Alex has made her point and eaten her second blini in three bites. “I can only tell you what I know, but it’s your life.”

“It’s a good one, Mama.” Alex, in that moment, means it entirely.

Tatiana picks up her vodka and points at Alex at the same time. “You will have a hard time, even though we’ve done our best to give you an easy one.” She shakes her head when Alex opens her mouth. “I’m not shouting at you. Listen. Your father doesn’t understand, but that’s because he’s a man. You think of him as your father, like Mikhail is your brother, yes? You don’t know men yet, but you’ll find out that even the best of them might not be able to take it, that you’re better than them, and that you won’t ever need them the way they want you to. If you marry, remember that if he tries to make you small, he’s wrong. Remember that if any of them try to make you small, they are wrong, not you. If it’s because of something you’ve done, that’s different. Everyone makes mistakes. If it’s because of what you are? They’re wrong.” Her mother gulps the vodka and sets the glass down in its ring of condensation. “Happy birthday.”

It’s an invitation to reply with a joke, with “thanks, Mama,” and a sarcastic toast. It’s an invitation to deflect, but Alex has read enough history to know where her mother comes from. It’s Moscow, but not the Moscow Alex knows, not the place where Alex can expect to be successful beyond her wildest dreams. It’s a mirror image of where her mother is from, but the glass between is impenetrable, and it’s more than generational. Alex can live where she wants, travel where she wants, eat where and when she wants. Alex does not belong to Russia the way her mother did, even though in her own way she is just as attached.

She’s not her mother, and they don’t have the same secrets. “What if I never have a husband?” she asks, mouth utterly dry despite the alcohol.

Tatiana refills her glass. “If you never have a husband… you will always be as you are.” She refills Alex’s glass too, nudging it towards her with her thickened knuckles, hard after years of use. “You’re my daughter. I birthed you.” She pauses, looking at Alex across the table. She doesn’t smile, lifting her glass in a little toast before drinking. “Maybe you’ll be better off.”

“Thanks, Mama,” Alex says, finally, when she can breathe again, when the vodka has burned its way down her frozen throat. “I…”

“Don’t tell me,” Tatiana says. “Remember what I said. Remember that I’ll fight with you, but I can’t do it for you, so pick your battles.”

“I will.” Alex wonders what the feeling in her stomach is, like rocks in a quarry crashing into each other as they’re carved from the cliffside. It isn’t relief. Alex might liken it to being tackled, run into the boards, but it doesn’t hurt, precisely. It’s more like skating away from a blow, knowing the adrenaline is carrying her and that any injury will only make itself known later, when she’s still.

-

The Home Depot pictures are in the Washington Post. It is very much not how Alex imagined spending her one day off in three weeks, but she has six missed calls from her agent and three from the GM, and they’ve all set up a meeting for Alex and Nicke’s free day. They’re meant to head out on a West Coast trip the day after, but apparently the matter is urgent enough that they can lose a day of rest over it.

Nicke doesn’t argue, but the sour set to her mouth as she talks to her agent in rapid Swedish colours their entire week, and Alex gets nervy with it, confronted again and again with the grainy images of herself splayed against a display of tiles with her head thrown back, Nicke’s unmistakable profile leaning in, poised on the balls of her feet in her wonderful, ugly running shoes to kiss Alex’s neck, the curve of her jaw, her lips.

Alex can still feel it, the shock of heat through her body, the lack of any awareness beyond the two of them.

Alex looks at them and almost doesn’t recognise herself, except for how it can’t possibly be anyone else. She looks thrilled. She looks, in a certain way, beautiful to herself, looking at this snapshot of perfect abandon with Nicke. It’s immensely strange to think this could be a problem, when it looks so right.

Alex and Nicke don’t have the same agent, which is probably for the best. If they lived together, fucked together, played together, did promotion together and had the same agent, there might be serious danger of them either merging spontaneously or blowing apart spectacularly. As it is they already make a habit of switching out roomies on road trips, and Nicke only seeks out the seat next to Alex on the plane if there’s a hint it might be a bumpy ride.

They arrive at George’s office separately, with their respective agents in tow. Gennady has flown in from Moscow for this, and Tove from Stockholm. They exchange brief words in English in the foyer, and Alex wraps Nicke in a hug, tall enough in her most fuck-you heels that she can rest her chin on the top of Nicke’s combed-back hair.

Nicke sighs and folds inwards, rigid set of her shoulders melting into Alex’s embrace before she pulls away and squares off again, looking at Alex like she’s facing a tribunal.

Alex grabs her by the hand. “Sorry,” she mutters, feeling like she ought to have said it earlier, somehow.

“Why?” Nicke asks, but before Alex can answer, George McPhee is ushering them all in. The room is filled with men, and Alex feels starkly female in comparison, aware in a moment of their scrutiny.

They sit down. Someone offers her water and she declines, sprawled over the too-plush chair, knowing she’s big enough to make it look small.

George clears his throat. “I guess there’s no good way to start. Do you two have… an intimate relationship?”

Nicke lets out an incredulous noise. “Yes. Was that not— what did you think it was?”

“We thought you were best friends.”

“Best friends?” Alex looks at Nicke, and finds her looking back, both eyebrows raised in spectacular disbelief. “We live together,” Alex points out. “Since Moscow. Since we—”

“Since my first season with Dynamo,” Nicke says, in the even tone Alex only associates with Nicke’s most furious moments.

“Look, while we’ve come across this before, it’s very unusual for people to date teammates, and we—”

“Is this going to be a problem?” Nicke asks, ominously quiet.

“That depends. Would you like to announce it? Make a statement? People are speculating, and the more you two get photographed doing everything together, the more people will want to know.”

Alex says “yes” at the same time as Nicke says “no.”

“We’ll discuss it,” Nicke’s agent Tove says, while Nicke stares at Alex in silent disbelief.

“What do you mean ‘no?’” Alex asks, as soon as they’re free. Gennady is trying to get her attention, but Alex is bigger than him and easily brushes him off. He’ll forgive her. She’s his best client. Tove is tapping something on her phone and looks in no rush to interfere while Nicke and Alex have it out in the hallway.

“Can we talk about it at home?” Nicke looks around as though there might be someone with a camera lurking in the corridor, waiting to film them arguing.

Alex is about to protest, but Tove takes Nicke aside, leaving Gennady an opportunity to cut in on Alex. “We need to talk about how this will affect you in Moscow,” he points out.

“I don’t give a shit about Moscow,” Alex snaps. It’s a lie, but in the moment it’s also partly a truth. Momentary as it is, what Alex cares most about is Nicke, and Nicke looks about ready to leap out of her skin and let her skeleton drive home by itself. “Email me,” she amends, grabbing Nicke’s hand and towing her towards their cars.

They separate in the parking lot, but before Nicke takes herself away, Alex draws her closer, poised to let go in case Nicke decides it’s not what she wants. Nicke lets herself be drawn, though, and Alex reaches up, cupping her face between her palms.

Nicke lets her, which is something remarkable all by itself.

Alex has always thought she was marvellous, in the truest possible sense of the word. Alex considers her a marvel, a wonder of the world, the only person who understands her the way she has always wanted to be understood. They have never been at odds before, not like this. “Nicky, why—”

“We’ll talk at home,” Nicke says, but she takes so long to pull away that Alex almost asks her again.

-

The word “detente” has never entered Alex’s vocabulary, despite constant exposure to French-speaking Canadians. She comes across it when she’s googling synonyms for “argument,” (subheading “am I having an”) on her phone when she can’t sleep.

Nicke is fast asleep next to her. She doesn’t snore, but she makes noise sometimes, little half-words in Swedish and the occasional unsettling laugh. Alex has gotten so used to it that even when it’s absent, on roadies and when Nicke has gone home to Sweden, Alex can almost hear it.

On the surface not much has changed, except Alex has an inbox full of interview requests and Nicke has vetoed all of them, and won’t budge on any of it.

Alex has one message from her mother, and all it says is “be careful,” an unusually cryptic communication even from her, who will never say in eight words what could be said in three.

Gennady has called Alex three times a day since the meeting two days ago, and the night before they’re due to fly to LA like nothing is happening, Alex can’t sleep.

She gets up to gulp down a glass of water. While she’s up, she decides a midnight snack wouldn’t go amiss, and to hell with what the dietician says about digesting at night. She’s halfway through making herself an abominable midnight burrito out of an old crepe from Sunday morning and the leftover chili from the Nylanders’ last potluck when Nicke stumbles down the stairs.

“What are you doing?”

“Eating,” Alex points out.

“At three in the morning?”

“I’m hungry,” Alex says, testily. “Are you going to veto that too?”

Nicke stops in the kitchen doorway, her hair squashed up on one side and a pillow crease in her cheek. “I’m just— I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to always have to talk about it.”

“Don’t you think—”

“I don’t want to have to put my private life on display!” Nicke hisses. “Like it’s— like it’s _theirs._ ”

Alex swallows her mouthful. It tastes like clay going down, which is probably for the best, because this is the last place she wants to have this conversation, and the last moment she ever imagined Nicke’s guard crumbling, with Alex half-naked and sleep-deprived and lonely, even though they’re in the same apartment and sleep in the same bed. “This is what we signed up for,” she points out, unable to reach any kind of anger.

There’s something perverse about it, to be sure, the way the NHL demands so much more of them than just hockey. Alex got used to being on camera in Russia, but it’s not like it is here, where the script is different and the language is different and the demands of the audience are different. In Russia, as long as her hockey was great, and it was, there was nothing over it, no hint or hope of scandal, because Alex made herself before she ever even met Nicke, and Nicke has a way of fading into the background that Alex can’t quite force herself to understand.

Alex’s ambition is its own beast, but so is Nicke’s, and maybe Alex thinks she’s being a little bit naive to deny the reality of the consequences of it. Nicke wanted to play in the NHL. Alex wanted Nicke, and it was a simple want for all its complexity. Alex still wants her, and is willing to put herself on display for it. Fundamentally, Alex doesn’t want to deny it, not while she has the precarious safety of visibility Not while she’s too fucking good to argue with. Women in other leagues are open here. Women playing in the Olympics, in national competitions. It’s not the NHL, which is men all the way down, piles of them, multitudes, who’ll touch each other and admit to love they’ll never have to explain, but Alex _wants_ to. Alex wants to be like those women more than she’s ever wanted to be like those men.

Nicke stands there, radiating calm that Alex knows is patently, horribly false. “I don’t want to be a news story,” she says, “I don’t want to go on talk shows. I want to… I want this.” She gestures between them, jerky and flushed, suddenly, as though it’s just pushing out of her. “Your horrible underwear all over the floor and you eating in the middle of the night and I just—”

“Nicky…”

“I’ll see you on the plane,” she says, a hint of awful desperation in her voice, before going upstairs. Alex waits in the kitchen, frozen in place, until Nicke walks past the doorway again in sweatpants and one of the hoodies that used to be Alex’s, her travel bag flung over her shoulder.

Alex doesn’t get a second more sleep, but she finishes all the chili and half the Indian food still lurking on the top shelf of the fridge behind the vitamin waters before she forces herself into the shower.

Usually, Alex doesn’t mind wearing the game-day suits. She has a whole rack of them, tailored perfectly to her waist and cut to show off her thighs, and she enjoys slipping into them as a kind of prideful reminder that she’s meant to be wearing them. This morning her hands feel like lead, even as she lines her lips and reddens them, a blood colour that will rub off on every cup she touches, even as she buttons her shirt most of the way up.

She drives to the airport in a daze and is almost the first one there. The only one there before her is Nicke, who is asleep in her car, knees crunched into her chest and her feet up on the dash.

Alex knocks on her window, startling her awake. “Your suit will wrinkle,” Alex says, when Nicke rolls down the window. “Here.” Alex gives her what’s left of her coffee. It’s sweeter than Nicke likes it, but she takes it anyway and sips it without a word, right over where Alex’s lips have left a red crescent to mark their passing.

Nicke mumbles her thanks, groaning as she opens the door and straightens her legs.

Alex reaches for her, but stops herself, unsure of her welcome.

Nicke hands the coffee back and buries her face in her hands, trying to scrub sleep out of her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she mutters, elbows on her knees, sitting sideways out of her car with her hair sticking up every which way.

“We don’t have to tell anyone now,” Alex says, carding her fingers through Nicke’s hair, combing it down. “It can wait. It might blow over.”

“It won’t, will it?”

“Probably not,” Alex says. “At least not that many people care about hockey?”

Nicke lets Alex tease the tangles out of her hair until more cars start arriving and they have to get on the plane.

-

They win three of their four games, but it’s the last one they lose.

Heading home in a slump mood is always a hardship, and Nicke finds a spot in the back of the plane, next to Greenie, who has been conspicuously silent on the whole “Alex and Nicke got photographed making out in a Home Depot in front of everyone” thing, unlike the vast majority of their team-mates.

For the most part, it’s good-natured, the kind of ribbing Alex is getting used to from Americans and Canadians; they have no fine-tuning for sarcasm and sometimes her jokes edge just too far into the bleak for them, these big, brash men. So they tease her, but she knows it’s because she’s made a point of taking it, of always being quick with a laugh and quick to admit when English is defeating her, though it happens less and less often now. They wait for Nicke to tease them, and so far, she hasn’t, not about this.

Laich plops his long frame down next to her near the front of the plane and offers her a gluten-free protein bar that promises to be vaguely chocolate flavoured but will probably taste like chalk. “Are mom and mom fighting?” he asks.

“You lose bet?” Alex asks, pushing the protein abomination back over his side of the armrest.

“I volunteered,” he confesses.

“Don’t call me mom,” Alex warns him, not bothering to mask it with a smile. “I’m not you mother.”

“Your,” Brooks corrects her.

“Fuck you, Brooksie,” Alex snaps. “Not today, okay?”

He looks genuinely taken aback, penitent immediately. Alex wishes it was always so easy. “Sorry. It’s just— look, we all thought you guys were—”

“Why it’s such surprise?” Alex asks, tired of it, tired of it all, the rumble of the plane’s engines, the queries, the pressure of waiting, of wondering, of distance.

“We just— nobody wants to assume, I guess.”

“Maybe you assume, what’s so bad about it?”

Brooks doesn’t have an answer. Alex feels bad for snapping at him, but in a way, what’s worse is the facing-up of her own complacency, and the mask of her own happiness.

Alex hasn’t been significantly apart from Nicke for years and years, except when Nicke goes home and in all that time Alex has met her parents who she shares only limited common language with, and Nicke has come for dinner with Alex’s family in Moscow more then once, and none of them have ever asked. Alex knows why her own family doesn’t want to know, but theirs is an ignorance born of necessity, and one Alex has learned not to try to dispel. Maybe Nicke’s family is different, but Alex will never have that answer unless she asks her own questions. The point is that Alex can be at least confident that they know enough, and have their own reasons for not asking.

This is another sensation entirely; Alex is used to being seen, and this feels like a removal of herself, a scouring-out of her self-perception. She’d thought her love was as visible as she is, from certain angles. Apparently it’s not, and absurdly, it hurts. Maybe it’s always been naive of her to hope that she’s been surrounded by tacit acceptance and not base ignorance. Maybe Nicke is right, that they can just keep going as they have been and fuck the rest, fuck anyone who feels like they need an explanation.

Even thinking it, Alex wonders what parts of herself she’s slowly bent to compromise, and doesn’t find she has much of an answer.

Nicke comes home late. When she climbs into bed she smells like basement and roast chicken, and she’s got the rosy flush over her nose that means she’s been drinking the aquavit Michael Nylander keeps in his cabinet for her.

“Is your car—”

“Across town,” Nicke mumbles, kicking at the covers until they do what she wants them to. “Will you drive me over after practice tomorrow?”

Alex agrees, of course, but it’s the same kind of conversation they’ve been having for almost a week; even and ordinary. Alex misses her desperately, even when Nicke rolls over in her sleep and throws a leg over her knees, casually proprietary and easy with her touch.

Alex misses that in daylight hours. Alex misses being able to assume.

-

They drive over to Michael’s after practice, just like Alex promised.

Nicke falls asleep in the passenger seat, tape still on her fingers from where she’s taken to padding her knuckles, getting used to the feel of it for a little added protection against slashes, against the constant onslaught on the body that is a full NHL season.

She has yet to miss a game, even when Alex knows she’s bruised and tired and bleeding. Alex thinks about it sometimes, the weight they’ll both carry from this forever, but leading herself down that thought path only ever ends in a question mark. There’s no way to predict injury, just to accept the inevitability of uncertainty. Theirs is a sport with a short life span, a scant decade or so to excel. Sometimes the relentless pursuit of it eases for just a moment, the space of a breath, and Alex sees their drive, their relentlessness for what it is, a certain form of elemental obsession that she sometimes thinks makes them more akin to forces of nature than people. She wouldn’t be the person she is without a shred of arrogance, and neither would Nicke. It feels strange to have no way to push through the fog that’s drifted in between them, when Alex thought she understood her so well.

Alex wakes her up when they get to the Nylanders’ driveway. It’s already dark outside, light pouring out through the windows, filtered through the opaque curtains hanging from the frames. Alex hears voices inside, children, the bark of a dog.

It’s not as though she’s never been here before, but they are very much Nicke’s friends, the Nylanders. They offered her a place to stay and who have continued to offer their home to her for a glimpse of Sweden and a chance to breathe in her own language. It’s not as though Alex is unwelcome, but she’s more a stranger than Nicke is, and always feels as though she is intruding slightly when they have to switch the conversation to English so that everyone has a few words in common.

Nicke lets herself in with her spare key, and Alex waits in the car, just to make sure she’s got her car keys back and won’t need anything else before they convoy back across town. Instead, Nicke comes back to the door and opens it. “Michael wants us to stay for dinner,” she says. “You don’t have to.”

“Do you want me to go?”

Nicke frowns, letting the last of the spring cold into the car. “I just— just come in. Have dinner with us.”

Alex would take it as an order, were it not so clearly a plea.

She takes the key out of the ignition and follows her in, readying a smile for the riot of noise that is the Nylanders’ six children.

Somehow there is enough to feed an army, or four adults, two teenagers and four children, so Alex finds herself seated next to the youngest, who is four, blonde and bright-eyed and determined to divest her plate of all broccoli by surreptitiously slipping it onto Alex’s plate.

She catches her eye and eats most of it, sealing the unspoken pact. Alex wonders if it’s a function of being a child, the insertion of joyful abandon into everything, and if she’s just a little overdue for growing out of it. Her partner in crime laughs hard enough to give the game away and earns them both a gentle scolding from Mrs. Nylander, which Alex does her best to accept with penitence. She doesn’t succeed, but nobody seems to mind.

Across the table, Michael is watching Nicke, who is trying not to laugh. Alex beams at her and stuffs the last stalk of of illicit broccoli into her mouth. Nicke smiles back, and something sharp digs at Alex under her diaphragm, a hitch in her breath like a stitch.

The kids all pile off to the living room to play video games, and the youngest two get corralled upstairs into bed. Nicke and Alex end up cleaning with Michael, who surveys the debris in the kitchen with the strategic eye of a man well-used to living in chaos. Nicke starts passing him rinsed plates for the dishwasher, so Alex starts collecting bits and pieces from the living dining room and sorting them, for lack of knowing where anything goes. She has absolutely no facility for kitchens and feels oversized in this one, despite its high, beamed ceilings and the acres of counter space she supposes people must need to feed six children.

Nicke and Michael are speaking Swedish to each other, so Alex tunes them out, thoughts already beginning to run in circle the way they have been for days. Dinner seems only a brief respite, until Michael clears his throat. “I can take it from here,” he offers. “Maybe you two should go home?”

Nicke looks at Alex as though she might need confirmation.

Alex wants to sink to her knees on the crumb-strewn kitchen floor and rest her head on the curve of Nicke’s hip, just to make her stop looking at her like that, as though Alex could possibly be skittish of her. “Thank you for dinner,” she says instead, looking at Nicke. “Let’s go.”

-

Nicke follows Alex home. Her headlights in the rearview seem to waver, as though Alex’s desire to see them makes a mirage of the journey. The trip up to their apartment seems to take an age, a trek they’ve made hundreds of times new again for the silence of it.

In the elevator, Alex reaches for her hand. Nicke grips back just as hard, her thin fingertips pressing warm and dry over Alex’s knuckles. Nicke sighs and slumps back against the mirrored siding, reflected in multiples with her eyes closed and her head tipped back, her burnished hair loose over her shoulders.

They reach their floor without speaking. Alex tows her through the door.

Nicke lets go of her to set the alarm, and then they’re staring at each other, Nicke with dark circles under her eyes and the little scar in the top of her lip stark white against the rest of her skin where the overhead hall lights catch it, and Alex, looking back. “I can’t do this without you,” Alex blurts. “I don’t want to be where you aren’t, and if that means— I just want to go back to how it was. Do you want me to—”

“No, I—”

“I miss you,” Alex blurts. “We don’t have to say anything. I’ve just— it’s been such a long time and I’m… Maybe I want more than hockey, one day. I— I want it to be real. It just felt like it would be real.”

Nicke looks at her, her eyes wide and dark, the hallway the worst place they could have this conversation. The light is stark and unforgiving, the shadows under the bones of her face elongated, the whiteness of the wall behind her throwing her into the foreground, giving every exhausted crease of her lips its own life. Alex wants to touch her, aching with it, pain of it worse than anything she’s ever been dealt on the ice.

“It’s real,” Nicke says, hoarsely. “It’s always been— doesn’t it scare you? Any of it? Everyone looking at us and thinking they know everything? What happens when you have to keep answering the same question?”

Alex has no good answer. Fear isn’t something she’s familiar with like this, not when it’s lacking in adrenaline, when it’s something deeper and more uncertain. Alex is an arrow shot from a bow on her best days, and even if she’s the first to acknowledge herself as such, sometimes she wonders how much of that is just determination and not nature. “Take me to bed,” Alex says. “Please.”

Nicke lets out a long breath and reaches for her.

Alex isn’t sure what to do with herself when it’s Nicke turning to her for comfort, so she just holds her, pulling her close the way she has a thousand times, maybe, without even thinking about it.

Alex takes her to bed. Nicke’s wordlessness continues, silence carrying over as Nicke bites gently at the underside of Alex’s jaw, as she unbuttons her shirt and thumbs open the clasp of Alex’s bra, slipping it off her shoulders.

Nicke touches her with her eyes closed, hands cupping her breasts, thumbs moving reverently over the peaks of Alex’s nipples. It doesn’t feel new, but it feels even better for being old, for being a gesture of intimate habit.

Alex coils a strand of Nicke’s hair around her finger and tugs, just lightly. “Anything you want, Nicky,” she says, meaning it. “You and me.”

“It was easier in Russia,” Nicke says, leaning against Alex’s chest, warm and clothed, still, rough against Alex’s bare skin. “Nobody wanted to know.” She laughs, a small, strange sound. “Isn’t that fucked?”

Alex takes a handful of her hair, just hard enough to tilt Nicke’s face up, to see her. Nicke looks at her, and Alex thinks there’s something desolate in her that speaks to something in Alex that recognises it. It’s not why she loves her, but they might be too similar in some fundamental way, too singleminded to accept easily factors outside of their control. In Nicke, Alex thinks her need for order and her love of control masks it sometimes, the part of her that rails at the constant chaos of being the first to do what they do. Alex knows this about her, has always known this about her, since the first time Nicke ever told her how she got to Russia.

In Alex it’s a wilder thing, a drive to embrace a little chaos and see what happens, because life is short and she can feel time slipping out of her, in stiller moments. Alex wants wholly and fully, and maybe being blind to consequences is a choice.

“Tell me what to do,” Alex asks. “Tell me and I’ll do it.”

Nicke laughs at her, hands still skimming Alex’s waist, teasing at the fabric of her skirt bunched around her hips. “I think it’s your turn to tell me,” Nicke says, fingers finding the zipper at the side, easing it down.

Alex kisses her, taking the breath Nicke’s been holding, feeling her exhale under her hands.

Alex wants so much, suddenly, but all it really comes down to is this: Alex wants Nicke, any way she’ll take her, but that’s not quite as true as it used to be either. “What if I want to answer the same questions forever?” Alex asks. “What if I’m fine with that?”

Nicke doesn’t answer, just kisses her again. There’s a hint of desperation in it this time, an answer of a kind, because she pushes Alex down on the bed and finishes undressing her, then herself, until she’s naked and over-warm. Alex can’t help herself when it comes to this. There’s no part of her that doesn’t come alive at Nicke’s touch, the slip of her fingers, the impossible, aching press of her tongue.

When Nicke comes back up, Alex tastes herself on her lips. There’s no space between them, hardly any breath, but Nicke buries her face in Alex’s shoulder and whispers “okay,” against the curve of her neck, and Alex feels as though she’s been laid open, cut down the middle with everything that matters to her exposed.

Alex drags her fingers through Nicke’s hair, smoothing it away from her cheek. “Only if it’s true,” Alex says, bathed in the warmth of her, of them, safe under the covers, hoping it is.

-

One of the last publicity events of the regular season is an outdoor game. It’s too late in the year to be winter and it’s still too cold to be truly spring, the strange weather of March making birds restless and Alex jittery. She does her left eye three times before they get into gear, wanting them dark enough to absorb some glare but to still look right, and she just can’t quite get it.

Nicke watches her in the locker room, still prepping in her underarmor, black sheen if it clinging over the length of her arms and the breadth of her chest, high neckline making her skin and hair look stark in comparison.

Alex finally throws her compact back in her bag, satisfied, at last, by drawing a thick line of black across each cheekbone with two fingers. It probably won’t make a difference but Alex feels better painted anyway, messy and smudged and bold.

Nicke stands up, deviating from her usual routine of sorting her pads out from a big pile on the floor and goes over to where Greenie is finishing with a stick of greasepaint. She plucks it out of his fingers without asking, ignoring his squawk of dismay, and comes over to where Alex is sitting.

“Will you do it?”

Alex takes the stick out of her fingers and slides the tube up higher, like lipstick.

She stands, taller than Nicke in her socks but not nearly by as much as usual, divested of shoes or skates. She takes Nicke’s chin in her fingertips and tilts her face down and draws a line in a broad curve across her cheekbones, left to right, carrying on over the narrow bridge of her nose. When Nicke looks up again, Alex thinks she looks like a warrior, some kind of mythic creature. If she were facing her down, Alex would look twice.

“How does it look?” Nicke asks her.

“Perfect,” Alex whispers.

“Better not smudge it, then,” Nicke says, before she curls a hand around the back of Alex’s neck and pulls her down for a kiss.

The locker room erupts into a chorus of obligatory jeering, along with at least one wolf whistle, but Alex ignores it all. She closes her eyes, letting everything fade out beyond the warmth of Nicke’s lips on hers, the grip she has on her skin, the scent of padding and gear and Nicke, pressed up against her.

They break for breath with applause that might be sarcastic, but Alex doesn’t care, she doesn’t care at all about anything except for the smile in Nicke’s eyes, the black streak across her face still intact, making her look even paler in contrast, irises a brighter green. She does look perfect, to Alex, but she always has.

She isn’t, but that’s a reality for other times; everyone should be allowed moments of perfection every now and then.

“Get it, Nicky!” someone yells, and Nicke extends a middle finger to the room at large, before she pulls away to put on the rest of her gear.

Alex feels electric on the ice from the moment her skates touch the edge. The sun is bright overhead and the ice is bad as a consequence, slick and just a little too soft. None of it matters, because everything they do feels right today.

Nicke smiles at her, all her hesitation gone on the ice as it always is, and it feels like nobody stands a chance against them, not with Alex’s facility for bad ice after years of divisional KHL arenas all over Russia and Nicke’s startling accuracy.

Hockey is a team sport, and some days it just doesn’t click, but today it does. They switch off lines and catch their breath, and Nicke knocks her knees into Alex’s, offering her an ungloved hand. Alex takes it, not caring about the clamminess, the sweat, or the way her eye-black is streaming off in creases. She swipes a smudge off Nicke’s cheek with her thumb, and Nicke smiles at her, small and quiet, and lets her.

They win, but it almost doesn’t matter. For the handful of days when Alex only cares with half of herself instead of all of it, for today, she’s willing to admit that she feels like she’s won something better than a hockey game.

The whole of it is on camera; there are cameras in the arena, cameras in the locker room, cameras and reporters and Capitals media people asking her about the game and the day, how it is playing in the sun, everything she expected. Alex is happy to answer, but none of it feels like it touches her until they get back to the locker room and Alex sits down next to Nicke, waiting for their media scrums.

Nicke dumps all her pads on the floor, the better to create a little space for herself, but she leaves the paint on, a blurred streak across her face.

The scrum moves from Laich over to them, and as ever the lights are hot and the cameras glint under it, a hundred eyes that Alex has never learned to ignore but has always told herself to embrace. They ask her plenty of hockey questions, but Alex is sitting next to Nicke the way she always is, and can’t help but glance over, seeking her out behind a forest of arms.

“You two were on fire today,” a reporter observes, a familiar face, one Alex has always kind of liked for her direct attitude. “Any chance you’ll comment on your chemistry, or should I stop asking?”

Alex is about to answer when Nicke politely holds up a hand to her reporters, leans over to Alex’s side asks her to repeat herself. The scrum widens as though it’s got a mind of its own, even though Alex knows intimately that it’s just a crowd of people with a fine-tuned sense for a scoop making it easier for themselves to hear. She doesn’t begrudge them. Without them, she’d just be a name, and nobody would have heard it, but she’s learned to be wary of them well and often, and it’s hard not to see them as a mirror sometimes, reflecting back the worst parts of herself for show.

“We’ve been together since I moved to Moscow,” Nicke says, that little hint of haughtiness Alex loves so much entering her voice in the clipped tenor of her words, the way she manages to seem like she’s looking down, even when she’s seated. “I didn’t feel like we needed to explain ourselves.”

There’s an immediately clamour of voices talking over each other. “So why now?” someone gets out, sticking the microphone further into Nicke’s face.

Nicke glances at Alex and shrugs. “Because apparently we do,” Nicke says, “but it’s never been a secret.” She considers for a moment, looking at Alex, only at Alex, as though the cameras don’t matter at all. “I should have said it earlier, I think.”

Alex sees the footage later, when Gennady sends it to her. She doesn’t read his email, just watches herself beaming, missing tooth big and dark between her lips and the paint around her eyes and on her cheeks enough to make her look a little bit alien, if she didn’t recognise the happiness, bright and obvious, beneath it.

-

Management offers Alex an A at the end of the season, so she takes it. She’s in line for some silver at the NHL awards, so she and Nicke stay in Washington, in their oversized apartment with the undersized kitchen and the cavernous closet space, and decide to look for a house.

“I want to have a workroom,” Nicke confesses, when she suggests it. “Maybe a garden.”

Alex doesn’t ask when or if Nicke is going back to Sweden; by some unspoken pact, neither of them is going home yet, not this summer, not before July at least. Alex wants time more than anything, time to stay and time to breathe and time to make a little bit more of a home here without travelling.

It doesn’t feel like home yet, but it will.

Alex gets stopped in the Starbucks by a family with triplets, because sometimes her life is one long and convoluted farce. She poses for a picture with them and leaves the cafe with her order only a little later than she means to, sticky with hot-chocolate handshakes and the accidental spill of her own hazelnut latte all down her front, leaving a fetching coffee-stain all over the top of her left breast.

No matter how many times she tries, she can’t get the coffee machine to work right, but she likes the outing of it, the ritual of getting dressed to leave, then coming back with a sliver of the world in her hands, now that there’s nothing to say they have to leave the apartment.

Alex loses all sense of accomplishment when she gets home though, because Nicke is in the living room re-assembling the newest bookshelf, some custom thing from a boutique manufacturer that Nicke has never been convinced sits right against the wall, books in piles all over the floor, stacked neatly in order. She has a screwdriver in one hand and a spirit level wedged under her arm and the gape of her shirt at the missing sleeves robs Alex of all other thoughts as she watches her, catching a hint of her breasts and the muscles over her ribs, tense as she eases a board back into place.

Alex drops her phone on her foot.

Nicke looks over her shoulder, then looks again, a little smirk beginning to form at the very edge of her lips. “You have coffee on your shirt,” Nicke points out. “Take it off.”

Alex puts the coffee down on the nearest stack of books and does, t-shirt feeling too tight all of a sudden, rhinestones digging in where they never have before.

Nicke leaves the spirit level on the shelf she’s just replaced, placing the screwdriver down next to it with deliberate care, glancing at the rumpled fabric before she even looks at Alex, but she doesn’t say a thing. Instead, she beams at her, and as she approaches Alex wonders if this is what it feels like to make some kind of discovery, like a new kind of bird, or a new planet somewhere out of sight.

“And the rest of it,” Nicke says.

Alex leaves her clothes in a pile on the floor.

Nicke kisses Alex as though she’s been gone for days instead of an hour.

Nicke knows exactly how to keep her just on the edge, attuned to her body like a bow to a violin. It’s something more than just sex, more than the torturous heat of Nicke’s lips and the perfect pressure of her fingers. Alex has had years to get to know her, but sometimes she forgets how well Nicke has learned her, too.

Maybe it’s not always a good thing, to be so visible to someone, but Alex has only ever been herself, and wouldn’t begin to know any other way. They fit together, the two of them, even if Nicke will always prefer for Alex to draw the spotlight.

“We should get a dog,” Alex says after, still breathless. “We should get six dogs.”

“Let’s start with one.” Nicke strokes over Alex’s side, the hard jut of her shoulder, the curve of her waist, the heavy muscle of her hips.

She leaves her hand there, a bridge between them, an anchor.

**Author's Note:**

> Under-negotiated kink is implied but not much happens on screen. YMMV. 
> 
> Thanks again also to the dirtbags, because you guys have also been helpful and enthusiastic far above and beyond the call of duty. I love you all.


End file.
